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SPECIAL COLLECTOR’S EDITION 




The lOOOth Issue of Esquire 


FEATURING:THE MEN OF OUR TIME 


OCTOBER 2015 











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THE COLD OPEN 



SMASH TIME 
By Colum McCann 


Everyone has their own take on the past. For F. Scott Fitzgerald you couldn't repeat 
it. For William Faulkner it wasn't even past. For Eduardo G-aleano the time that was 
continues to tick inside the time that is. For Toni Morrison the past is there to be 
continually shaped. For Eugene 0 'Neill there was no present or future, only the past, 
happening over and over again, now. 

Until about six months ago, the past was my flip phone, the sort of machine 
guaranteed to get a laugh from just about anyone. I felt oddly smug about it. It 
was so uncool that it was almost cool. It was the sort of phone used by drug dealers 
in movies, snapped in two and thrown in an alleyway or flung off a bridge, all that 
sordid history suddenly disappearing. It had no camera, no apps, no games. It kept me 
at a dusty distance from the world. It was as if my life existed in a library. 

My new phone — bought on a whim, really — is a different sort of archive. I had 
sudden access to everything, as if I had come out of the library into the daze of 
Times Square. I could watch a soccer match, order a taxi, research a novel, read an 
ancient Humi poem, call up a photograph of my dead father, order a pizza, map my way 
home—the ridiculous, the sublime. It confused and thrilled me at the exact same 
time. It was as if I were suddenly carrying around all these pieces of smashed time. 

We are living in the mobile now. Never before has time been so agile. The past 
crashes into the present with ease. The future doesn't seem to surprise us at 
all. Anything can happen — and probably will. Distant events can unfold right in 
front of our eyes; sex, football, revolution. We have immediate access to just 
about everything that has been recorded — and, as we know, just about everything 
is recorded. Every sentence, every photo, every click, every like, every dislike, 
every street glance is logged, lodged, ledgered. We can't escape ourselves. The 
infobahn is endless. Street camera, computer camera, eyeglass camera, buttonhole 
lens, noise, noise, noise. 

This is the era of smash time — all the particles of yesterday, today, and tomorrow 
slammed together and carried around, bizarrely, in our hip pocket. 


25 



LAURll 


RALP 













^ACluJbtJL. 

THE COLD OPEN 

My kids got phones, too. A shock of electricity went along my spine when I realized 
what they were listening to. Hendrix, Lennon, Morrison: This was music from their 
grandfather ^s time. U2, Bowie, Thin Lizzy: music from my time. Pitbull, K^naan, 
American Authors: music from their time. All interlaced, with no self-consciousness 
at all, as if they had inherited this sense of smashed time and thought absolutely 
nothing about it. The old was no longer old. And the new was no longer necessarily 
hip. Everything is crushed together and here, now, like the pulse of an odd wound 
that only I — the older one — might recognize. But my recognition isn^t worth much. To 
my kids, the havoc is natural: They have been born in an age of collision. 

Smash time — at least for my generation, born before the AHPAnet, the LAHPAnet, the 
Internet — creates a sense of immediate uncertainty. The impossibility of hip. The 
collapse of the Zeitgeist. The dawn of the clock quarrel. 

In the mobile now, things last only as long as they are present on your ‘‘feed.” 

(Even the language we use suggests a patient in a hospital, a tube, a mask, a 
hacking cough.) How is it possible to know anything at all when the world is so 
instantaneously hyperlinked? Where do you find focus when there are a billion waves 
of information slamming your skin from all angles, all times, all machines? How do 
we recognize time, or fashion, or relevance when the old and the new are so 
intricately helixed? 

But enough whining. There is also something glorious about the ability to hypermix 
the past and the present so easily. That punch that Muhammad Ali threw in Zaire in 
1974 can still knock us on our asses today. Marilyn's skirt still rises ambitiously 
in the breeze along Lexington Avenue. Hemingw'ay's marlin is forever coming out of the 
water. The things they carried in Vietnam are still the things we carry into every 
other war we go into. The past deepens our present. 

Dizzying as our technology is, it provides access to potential that is fuller than 
any before. History gets diversified. The lungs of yesterday expand. We learn who we 
are when we see what we came through. The key to all this is deciding not to condescend 
to the past. It wasn't necessarily better. It wasn't cleaner. It wasn't nicer. It 
wasn't more colorful. It just was, and we can use it to inform what we are now. 

For all the white noise and doomsaying of today, there will be, in twenty years, 
an iconic image to bring us back to 2015 • We mightn't know it yet, because we 
haven't yet remembered it, but it is happening. It might even be there already, 
on your phone. 

For many years, psychologists and historians have been talking about the “end 
of history.” But there is no end, just as there is no beginning. It just keeps on 
happening. Some of us choose to think of this as depressing — as if we were merely 
hamsters on the flywheels of history. But fuck that. There's nothing depressing 
about this at all. In fact, it's possibly the opposite. We don't begin and we don't 
end. Father, we keep on remembering and we keep on creating. And we find ourselves 
new ways to remember in this smash time. FI 


28 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


Colum McCann's new book. Thirteen Ways of Looking, will be published in October. 




Watch Xavier Dolan's exclusive interview at louisvuitton.com 


LOUIS VUITTON 



ILLUSTRATION BY SAWDUST 


OCTOBER 2015 • VOLUME 164 / NO. 3 

Table of Contents 





Shazam 
Magazine! 

A how-to... 




TO 



Kennedy, 
JohnF. 

The photogenic death of 
an ugly presidency. 

By Stephen Marche 

Page 134 


TO 

Talese 

Interviewed by Cal Fussman 
AND 

Wills 

Interviewed by Cal Fussman 
AND 

Wolfe 

By Tom Junod 

Pages 196, 206, and 208 


War 


Page 197 


THE looom ISSUE 

THE HISTORY OF MODERN AMERICA AS SEEN THROUGH 
THE PAGES OF THIS MAGAZINE 


AND 

Women 

The eternal debate 
between Ephron and Mailer— 
Nora and Norman— on how 
much we got them wrong. 

By Lisa Taddeo 

Page 210 


THE COLD OPEN 

Smash Time. 

TO 

bin Laden, Osama 

Page 50 



By Colum McCann 

Page 25 




EDITOR'S LETTER 

The Eternal Now. 

Page 40 

TO 

Cars 

Where did the wanderlust go? 

By Sam Smith 

Page 56 




— 




The 

Encyclopedia 

ofEsquire 

An alphabetical index of 
people, events, body parts, 
tragedies. Ideas, and 
stories that mattered to us 

AND 

Cocktails 

The long road from the gin 
and orange juice of Prohibition. 

By David Wondrich 

Page 72 




then and matter now: 

Page 47 

AND 

Forty-nine 
Sentences 
of Great Esquire 
Fiction 

Page 106 




FROM (IN PART)... 

Achievements, 

Dubious 

Page 48 

PLUS: 

The Unseen Outtakes 

By FISCHER, CARL— the photographer who created Esquire’s 
most famous covers: Ali impaled, Warhol in soup, Liston as Santa. 

Page 110 


ON THE COVER: TYPOGRAPHY BY SAWDUST. ON THE COVER FOLDOUT: MUHAMMAD ALI PHOTOGRAPHED BY CARL FISCHER; 

GEORGE CLOONEY PHOTOGRAPHED BY SAM JONES; BILL CLINTON PHOTOGRAPHED BY PLATON. 3 1 


CAjCIUVzJC. 


OCTOBER 2015 • VOLUME 164 / NO. 3 


THE CLASSIC THEMES 

NEW STORIES 


The, 

Search 

for 

Malaysia 
Air 370 


A year and a half into 
the plane's disappearance, a 
small crew scours the 
canyons of the world's most 
mysterious abyss. 

By Bucky McMahon 


Page 60 


MARK 

ZUCKERBERG 
IS THE 

FIRST ZUCKER- 
BERGIAN 
HERG 

The studied happiness 
of history's most 
connected human. 

By Tom Junod 

Page 84 


The 

Walking 

Hemingway 

The great dead white 
male, a father to the 
American novel (and 
this magazine), is 
still not fully interred. 

By Stephen Marche 

Page 120 



THE 
END OF 
WAR 

The best war reporter 
of his generation— writing 
from the pile on 9/11 and 
through Iraq, Afghanistan, and 
the madness of Syria— 

C. J. Chivers finally had 
to stop. 

By Mark Warren 

Page 198 


Style, 
Past and 
Present 

A demonstration of how 
much has (and hasn't) 
changed in more than eighty 
years of men caring a little 
about their clothes. 

Page 186 


A SPECIAL 
PORTFOLIO 

The Men 
of Our 
Time: 
Esquire 
Legends 

Eleven living men— and 
a woman— who have 
obsessed Esquire for 
years, even decades. 

Page 152 


32 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


1.855.44.ZEGNA ZEGNA.COM 






OCTOBER 2015 • VOLUME 164 / NO. 3 


THE GREATEST 

TABLE OF CONTENTS OF ALL TIME 


THE PERFECT ISSUE OF ESQUIRE 


COVER 

Muhammad Ali 

as Saint Sebastian April 1968 

EDITOR'S LETTER 

Arnold Gingrich Autumn 1933 

SERVICE AND CHARTS 

“Latins Are Lousy Lovers/’ 

by Helen Lawrenson October 1936 

“The Structure of the American 
Literary Establishment/’ 

by L. Rust Hills July 1963 

“The $20 Theory of the Universe/’ 
by Tom Chiarella March 2003 

ESSAYS 

“A Good Job Gone/’ 

by Langston Hughes April 1934 

“The Crack-Up/’ 

byF. Scott Fitzgerald Spring 1936 

“A Few Words About Breasts,” 

by Nora Ephron May 1972 

“Holy Water,” 

byJoanDidion December 1977 

“Long Live the Career Smoker,” 

byDaveEggers April 1998 

“The Cynic and Senator Obama,” 
by Charles R Pierce June 2008 

INTERVIEWS 

“Faulkner in Japan” 

William Faulkner December 1958 

“How Can We Get Black People to 
Cool It?” 

James Baldwin July 1968 

ESQ+A: Philip Seymour Hoffman, 
interviewed by Scott Raab 

November 2012 


FICTION 

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” 

by Ernest Hemingway August 193( 

“This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise,” 

byJ.D. Salinger October 1945 

“The Illustrated Man,” 

by Ray Bradbury July 1950 

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” 

by Truman Capote November 1958 

“Parker’s Back,” 

by Flannery O’Connor April 1965 

“A Jewish Patient Begins 
His Analysis,” 

by Philip Roth April 1967 

“The Things They Carried,” 

by Tim O’Brien August 1986 

“Something to Remember Me By,” 

by Saul Bellow July 1990 

“All the Pretty Horses,” 

by Cormac McCarthy March 1992 

“Nirvana,” 

by Adam Johnson August 2013 

FEATURES 

“Marlin Off the Morro,” 

by Ernest Hemingway Fall 1933 

“The Greatest Bullfight Ever,” 

by Barnaby Conrad April 1948 

“Superman Comes to the Supermart,” 

by Norman Mailer November 1960 

“Twirling at Ole Miss,” 

by Terry Southern February 1963 

“The Last American Hero Is Junior 
Johnson. Yes!” 

by Tom Wolfe March 1965 

“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” 

by Gay Talese April 1966 

“M,” by John Sack October 1966 

“Martin Luther King Is Still on the 



1968 

What Do You Think of 
Ted Williams Now?” 

dwu^Ben Cramer June 1986 

“The String 

by David Foster Wallace July 1096 

“Old,” 

by Mike Sager September 19^18 

“The Falling Man,” 
by TomJunod September 2003' 

“The School,” 

by C. J Chivers June 2006 

“The Last Abortion Doctor,” 
by John H Richardson 

September 2009 

“Roger Ebert: The Essential Man,” 

by Chris Jones March 2010 

“ 'Heavenly Father!’ T love you all!’ 

T love everyone . . ” 

by Luke Dittrich October 2011 

“The Shooter,” 

by Phil Bronstein March 2013 

WOMEN 

“Varga Calendar” January 1942 

“The Happiness of Angie Dickinson” 

March 1966 

“Scarlett Johansson Is the Sexiest 
Woman Alive,” 

by A. J Jacobs November 2006 

STYLE 

“The Monogram on This Man’s Shirt 

Is J.F.K.” January 1962 

WHAT rVE LEARNED 

Woody Allen, 

interviewed by CalFussman 

September 20/3 



34 


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ESQUIRE aASSIC 

EVERY DAMN ISSUE EVER 


This issue contains multitudes. 

It is the 1,000th issue of Esquire. But it is also the first issue, 
from Autumn 1933, with Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, 
and Dashiell Hammett. And the 320th issue, from July 1960, with 
James Baldwin, Truman Capote, and Gay Talese. And the July 
2001 issue, with Scott Raab on Don Zimmer and Michael Pater- 
niti on Eerran Adria. 

It is all these things because of something that we’re launching 
now, eighty-two years in: Esquire Classic, our living archive of 
every issue and article ever published from 1933 to today. 

It’s a new way of experiencing Esquire, and it’s quite literally 
all there. Every John Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald and 
Norman Mailer and Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe and Stephen 
King story, all gorgeously viewable in their original form- 


readable, searchable, shareable. You can check out “The Snows 
of Kilimanjaro” in the same sitting as “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” 
But you’ll also find new stuff on Esquire Classic: suggested reads 
of the day, exclusive essays and commentary, reading lists curated 
by editors and special guests. 

To celebrate the launch, we teamed up with Shazam to digitally 
link this 1,000th issue to more than fifty of our greatest stories of 
all time. So when you read about Mailer’s “Superman Comes to 
the Supermart” on page 136, you can get the full story from 1960 
right then and there. Now! 

Sounds wacky, we know. But it’s pretty simple. And damn cool. 
Best part: If you already have the Shazam app on your phone, 
you’re halfway there. You don’t have to download a thing. 

Check out the directions below, and we’ll see you on Classic. 


HOW TO READ ONE THOUSAND ISSUES OF ESQUIRE 




On nearly every 
page of the 1,000th 
issue, you'll see a 
Shazam logo like the 
one on the far right. This 
means there's a link. 


Pull out your 
phone or tablet. 
(Click off Facebook.) 


Open your Shazam 
app (yes, the normal 
one you use to figure 
out what that annoying 
song blasting in 
the bar is). 


Hit the little 
camera icon 
on the upper left 
corner, here. 


Aim the viewfinder at the 
target indicated and the 
story will appear. For in- 
stance, Shazam this logo 
to go to Esquire Classic. 

It's that simple. 


38 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHRIS PHILPOT 



AVAILABLE AT MACY’S AND MACYS.COM 



CKNTLKMEN 

ONLY 

CIVIlNCI 1Y 






THE 

ETERNAL 

NOW 


At (approximately) the same moment that this issue, our 
1,000th, gets to you, we are launching a complete digital 
archive of Esquire. Every cover, every story, every photo- 
graph, every advertisement— all available (for five dollars) 
via your phone, your tablet, your desktop, or any other de- 


vice. ST Because we’ve spent 
a good amount of time plan- 
ning and executing both this 
issue and the archive, as well 

as figuring out how to connect the two, 
I’ve been thinking a lot about the past. 
I’ve been thinking about the fact that we 
live in a time in which the past has never 
been more present. When I first started 
exploring what we could do with this 
issue, I used a phrase— the Eternal Now— 
that I hoped would explain the potential 
of linking the past to the present through 
a print publication and a common mobile 
app. (And we have. See page 38.) 

That phrase came to mind shortly after 
Steve Jobs and Apple launched the iTunes 


store in 2003. Within a couple months, my 
then-teenage daughters discovered it and 
started sampling widely and occasionally 
purchasing music. It occurred to me then 
that they didn’t necessarily know that the 
Beatles were from 1967. It was all fresh to 
them, all new. The past was present. 

(Funny story: During the interview 
we did with Jobs on the occasion of the 
iTunes debut. Jobs suddenly stood up 
and left, and security came in and es- 
corted our writer out of the building. I 
subsequently began getting calls threat- 
ening that Apple would never advertise 
in the magazine again if we ran the inter- 
view. We did, and Apple didn’t— for a long 
time. Today, right now, if you want to read 
that interview and try to figure out what 


J 



®o 

Scan the photo above 
to read our contentious interview 
with Steve Jobs. 

offended Jobs, you can summon it on 
your iPhone or iPad. In fact, just to dem- 
onstrate, use your phone to Shazam the 
photo on this page and we will take you 
to that story. The past is present.) 

THE PAST IS ALSO A weighty thing. 
When I moved into the first office I oc- 
cupied as the editor of Esquire, it had 
bound volumes containing the vast ma- 
jority of Esquires ever printed. They were 
on shelves above the credenza behind 
my desk. I was so daunted by them that I 
rarely, if ever, opened one. And then, one 
Monday morning, I came in to find that 
the shelving had given way and the hun- 
dreds of pounds of Esquires had crashed 
onto the credenza and spilled onto the 
floor. I realized they could not be ignored. 

Ten men were responsible for that pile: 
the former editors in chief Arnold Gingrich 
(1933-45), Frederic A. Birmingham (1946- 
57), Harold TP. Hayes (1963-73), Don 
Erickson (1973-77), Byron Dobell (1977), 
Clay S. Felker (1978-79), Phillip Moffitt 




ARNOLD GINGRICH (1903-1976) FOUNDING EDITOR 


DAVID GRANGER, EDITOR IN CHIEF; PETER GRIFFIN, DEPUTY EDITOR; HELENE F. RUBINSTEIN, EDITORIAL DIRECTOR; DAVID CURCURITO, DESIGN DIRECTOR; LISA HINTELM ANN, EDITORIAL 
PROJECTS DIRECTOR; MARK WARREN, EXECUTIVE EDITOR; NICK SULLIVAN, FASHION DIRECTOR; JOHN KENNEY, MANAGING EDITOR; RICHARD DORMENT, ROSS McCAMMON, SENIOR EDITORS; 
TYLER CABOT, SENIOR FEATURES EDITOR & DIRECTOR, ESQUIRE LABS; NATE HOPPER, ANNA PEELE, ASSOCIATE EDITORS; JACK DYLAN, DIRECTOR OF MOBILE EDITIONS; JULIA BLACK, ASSISTANT 
TO THE EDITOR IN CHIEF; JESSIE KISSINGER, ASSISTANT EDITOR; NATASHA ZARINSKY, EDITORIAL ASSISTANT; A. J. JACOBS, EDITOR AT LARGE; ART: STRAVINSKI PIERRE, ART DIRECTOR; 
BENJAMIN CARUBA, DEPUTY ART DIRECTOR; TITO JONES, SENIOR DESIGNER, E-READERS; IVANA CRUZ, DESIGN ASSISTANT; STEVE FUSCO, DIGITAL IMAGING SPECIALIST; PHOTOGRAPHY: 
MICHAEL NORSENG, PHOTO DIRECTOR; STACEY PITTMAN, PHOTO EDITOR; AMY WONG, PHOTO COORDINATOR; FASHION: WENDELL BROWN, SENIOR FASHION EDITOR; MICHAEL STEFANOV, 
MARKET EDITOR; ALFONSO FERNANDEZ NAVAS, FASHION ASSISTANT; COPY: ALISA COHEN BARNEY, SENIOR COPY EDITOR; CHRISTINE A. LEDDY, ASSOCIATE COPY EDITOR; RESEARCH: 
ROBERT SCHEFFLER, RESEARCH EDITOR; KEVIN MCDONNELL, ASSOCIATE RESEARCH EDITOR; MAZIE BRYANT, ASSISTANT RESEARCH EDITOR; WRITERS AT LARGE: TOM CHIARELLA, CAL FUSSMAN, 
CHRIS JONES, TOM JUNOD, CHARLES P. PIERCE, SCOTT RAAB, JOHN H. RICHARDSON, MIKE SAGER; CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: ANDREW CHAIKIVSKY, LUKE DITTRICH, KEN KURSON, 

ANDY LANGER, STEPHEN MARCHE, FRANCINE MAROUKIAN, COLUM McCANN, BENJAMIN PERCY, SAM SMITH, DAVID WONDRICH, DRINKS CORRESPONDENT; ADRIAN G. URIBARRI, DIRECTOR, 
ESQUIRE MENTORING INITIATIVE; ESQUIRE INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS: BULGARIA, CHINA, COLOMBIA, CZECH REPUBLIC, GREECE, HONG KONG, INDONESIA, KAZAKHSTAN, KOREA, LATIN 
AMERICA, MALAYSIA, MIDDLE EAST, NETHERLANDS, PHILIPPINES, POLAND, ROMANIA, RUSSIA, SINGAPORE, SERBIA, SPAIN, TAIWAN, THAILAND, TURKEY, UNITED KINGDOM, VIETNAM; DIGITAL: 
MICHAEL MRAZ, DIRECTOR OF CONTENT OPERATIONS, MEN'S GROUP; JOHN SELLERS, EDITOR, ESQUIRE.COM; JESSICA GLAVIN, LIFESTYLE EDITOR; PAULSCHRODT, ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR; 
ANDREW D. LUECKE, STYLE EDITOR; MATT PATCHES, JILL KRASNY, SENIOR WRITERS; JOHN HENDRICKSON, ASSOCIATE EDITOR; ERIC VILAS-BOAS, ASSISTANT EDITOR; DAVE HOLMES, WRITER AT LARGE 


40 ESQUIRE -OCTOBER 2015 


PHOTOGRAPH BY TAGHI NADERZAD 




THIS IS MACHINE WASHABLE 

TECHNICAL CASHMERE™ 




A NOTE 
FROM THE 


EDITOR 


(1979-84), Lee Eisenberg (1984-90), 
Terry McDonell (1990-93), and Edward 
Kosner (1994-97). 

Some of Hayes’s furniture was still scat- 
tered around the office when I first got 
here in 1997, but I never met him. Phillip 
Moffitt (and his friend and partner Chris 
Whittle) was the reason I started reading 
Esquire. The two of them had graduated 
from the University of Tennessee a de- 
cade or so ahead of me and had launched 
a little publishing empire in Knoxville. In 
1979, they bought Esquire. I wasn’t sure 
what Esquire was, but I knew it was im- 
portant. I started reading it. It became 
my magazine. 

I know Terry McDonell. He’s a great, 
interesting editor who edited aversion of 
Esquire that published stories with the 
power to make me question ever 5 l;hing. 
The only story by William Vollmann (“De 
Sade’s Last Stand,” November 1992) that 
I ever read all the way to the end was 
published by Terry. It was one of several 
moments early in my career as an editor 
that forced me to ask myself. Wow: Is a 
magazine allowed to do that? 

I’m beholden to each of those ten men. 

I’m beholden because Esquire is not 
an inevitability. Over the course of the 
two -hundred-plus issues I’ve edited, I’ve 
learned that Esquire requires eternal vig- 
ilance. It needs, as a magazine with no 
“special” interest or emphasis, to make an 
argument for itself in a way that not ev- 
ery magazine must. Though Esquire was 
the first men’s magazine, dozens of mag- 
azines have come along in our eighty- two 
years that have adopted some element of 
Esquire and made it their singular focus. 

Esquire’s strength, as articulated by 


U 

I’ve learned 
that Esquire 
requires eternal 
vigilance. 

It needs to make 
an argument for 
itself in a way 
that not every 
magazine must. 

Arnold Gingrich in the first issue, is that 
it can do anything its editors and writ- 
ers and designers and photographers 
imagine. This is what Gingrich wrote: 
“Esquire aims to become the common 
denominator of masculine interests— to 
be all things to all men. ... It is our belief, 
in offeringEsQuiRE to the American male, 
that we are only getting around at last to 
a job that should have been done a long 
time ago— that of giving the masculine 
reader a break.” 

But that impulse— to be all things to all 
men— also led the magazine down some 
dead ends. Esquire has teetered on the 
edge of extinction numerous times. And 
when it has, it’s been because its staff took 
its existence for granted, assumed that it 
deserved to exist— or settled for execut- 
ing the fantasy of a successful “formu- 
la” that had worked for Esquire at some 
time in its past. 


On the contrary, Esquire is at its best 
and most successful when it starts over, 
when it is reimagined by the people who 
make it in order to better address the lives 
of its readers. 

And yet . . . one thing the magazine’s 
archive has allowed me to realize is that 
there is a kinship among those who have 
created Esquire over all these years. On 
the magazine’s fourth anniversary, in Jan- 
uary 1938, the editors recapped the high- 
lights for those who had missed them. It 
was called “Autobiography of a Four-Year- 
Old,” and it was funny. Mostly, it was about 
all the people (and nations) they had of- 
fended in their first few issues. It made me 
feel like I could sit at a bar with those guys. 

The main man, of course, was Gingrich. 
His idea— to make a general-interest mag- 
azine for men at a time when magazines 
were regarded as the domain of women— 
has not only survived the tests of time and 
economic depression and wars and soci- 
etal upheaval and technological changes. 
It has also grown and expanded across 
every form of expression. Esquire means 
something. It stands for an uncommon 
level of ambition coupled with wit and 
an engaging personality. Gingrich creat- 
ed that. Throughout this issue, you’ll see 
our little homage to his achievement. All 
the display type (the headlines and sub- 
heads) on its pages is in a new typeface 
we asked Christian Schwartz to design 
for this issue. We’ve named it Gingrich. 

^ 

DAVID GRANGER 

EDITOR IN CHIEF 


CAJC^ublJE. 


JACK ESSIG, SENIOR VICE-PRESIDENT, PUBLISHING DIRECTOR & CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER; MARCIA KLINE, ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER/ADVERTISING; JILL MEENAGHAN, ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER/ 
GROUP MARKETING DIRECTOR; SAMANTHA IRWIN, GENERAL MANAGER, HEARST MEN'S GROUP; BRIAN MCFARLAND, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, DIGITAL; CARYN KESLER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR 
OF LUXURY GOODS; JOHN WATTIKER, DIRECTOR OF INTERNATIONAL FASHION; LEAH DOYLE, DIRECTOR OF SPIRITS AND ENTERTAINMENT; ANDREW C. BOWEN, AMERICAN FASHION, RETAIL 
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42 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 









T O M M Y :ffTH I L F I G E R 






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RAFAEL NADAL 

#TOMMYXNADAL 


TOMMY- HI 


UNDERWEAR 


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RAFAEL NADAL 

#TOMMYXNADAL 


Tomm y zm 


ILLUSTRATION BY SAWDUST 


f^jCiitbuE. 

OCTOBER 2015 / THE 1000TH ISSUE OF ESQUIRE 



THE 

ENCYCLOPEDIA 

OF THE GREAT SPRAWLING WONDER THAT IS AMERICA THROUGH THE LENS 

“ESQUIRE 

EVERYTHING THIS MAGAZINE has ever published lives I enlightening and entertaining as anything just published, 
on— the pages full of yakking and provocations and ads and Even when the particular subjects at hand are long dead or 
embarrassing cartoons— though mostly in exile between the irrelevant, the stories and pictures themselves stay alive, if 
covers of old issues at yard sales. Open one and it’s 1966 or only as windows on their time. So we’ve devoted this issue— 
1951 or 2013 all over again, full of life and noise and nonsense. in part— to that vividly present past, an alphabetical collec- 
But often also full of amazing stories and photos and personal tion of subjects and stories and writers and obsessions that 
essays and jaw- dropping reporting that seem as moving and I mattered once and often still matter in the lives we live now. 


47 






Achievements, Dubious 

Helped give birth to the plague of modern 
irony. Their endlessly copied fake-head- 
line-on-a-news-item format was invent- 
ed by Robert Benton, Esquire’s art direc- 
tor, and David Newman, an editor, and first 
appeared in the January 1962 issue. (Benton 
and Newman went on to write the screen- 
play for Bonnie and Clyde, and Benton to 
direct eleven movies, including R'mmer vs. 
Kramer^ The Dubious Achievement Awards 
ran annually for the next forty- six years. 


Ali, Muhammad 

See THE MEN OF OUR TIME. 


Anonymous 

Early years were marked by odd confession- 
als like “Why I Stopped Collecting Stamps.” 
Served as a ghostwriter for female authors 
through the mid-1940s, so their work could 
appear in a men’s magazine. Turned up in 
1967 with “Confessions of a Campus Pot 
Dealer.” “Sleeping Around” (1991) would be 
the first of many tales of promiscuity, inebri- 
ation, cheating, and lying. A passage from “46 
Women Who Are Not My Wife” (2001) illus- 
trates the j ourney of this bold yet timid writ- 
er: “I don’t want to have to recoil anymore 
from what I’ve been and done. I’mno Casano- 
va. I’m no monster. This is the best lean do.” 



©Q 

Shazam Arbus's image of Ratoucheff above and go to the full portfolio 
of her photos in the July 1960 issue. 

Arbus, Diane 

Norman Mailer once said— after Diane Arbus photographed 
him— that “giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a 
live grenade in the hands of a child.” She detonated more than 
thirty of them in Esquire in the 1960s. This was the first mag- 
azine to publish her work-in July 1960, including the pho- 
tograph above of the actor Andrew Ratoucheff— and also one 
of the last, her final photographs in our pages appearing only 
a month before she committed suicide with a razor blade in 
July 1971, at age forty-eight. 


1933 


Observations 
after reading 
the first issue of 
Esquire 

ByA.J. Jacobs 


> Esquire promised 
to be a "fashion guide 
for men." But never 

a primer for "fops" 
or "gigolos." 

> "There are two kinds 
of married men: those 
afraid of their wives and 
those who lie about it." 

> There was this new- 


fangled invention called 
the "Talon slide fasten- 
er" (later renamed the 
"zipper"). You need to 
buy it, because buttons 
cause "bulky ugliness." 

> Esquire published 
poetry. But not sissy poet- 
ry: "Dead men in barrels, / 
Dead men in sacks / 


Trussed up with wire / 
Knees at their necks." 

> "The black marlin 
is a stupid fish." 
—Hemingway 

> Best sentence that I 
didn't understand but 
that might well be 
dirty: "The Kid's maw 
was having a hard time 


on her 640 what with 
grubbin sage." 

► Women steal every- 
thing, including 
possibly this magazine. 
"Although we tried to 
make it as masculine as 
a moustache... there's 
no predicting a 
woman's taking ways." 


48 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


Shazam the "1933" story above to read the first issue of Esquire. 


THE ESTATE OE DIANE ARBUS; IMAGE PROVIDED BY SPENCER MUSEUM OE ART, THE UNIVERSITY OE KANSAS, 1980.0237 



ILLUSTRATION BY JOE McKENDRY 


1 

Baldwin, James 


“I MAY BE PARANOIC, Lord knows, any- 
body can be, but I am sick of these literary 
cocktail parties where people congratu- 
late themselves because I, Jimmy Bald- 
win, have made it. Well, screw ’em. /made 
it. They didn’t do it for me. And I didn’t do 
it for any old Cadillac, I did it just for me. 
They act as if I’m now about to become the 
luckiest black man in the world because 
I’ve managed to become like theml Believe 
me, they couldn’t be more wrong.” 

That is Baldwin, as quoted in a profile 
by Marvin Elkoff in this magazine (“Ev- 
erybody Knows His Name,” August 1964), 
at the moment when Baldwin— himself a 
regular contributor to Esquire— was en- 
joying his greatest celebrity. He had long 
been a leading voice of black America and 
was established as a novelist and essayist 
(The Fire Next Time had been a number- 
one best seller) and pla 5 Twright (his play 
Blues for Mister Charlie was being readied 
for Broadway). He was butting heads with 
Lee Strasberg and thrilled that Burgess 
Meredith was to direct. He was in demand, 
fawned over equally by black radicals, the 
white liberal elite, and the glamour facto- 
ries of Hollywood, theater, and publishing. 

Baldwin had begun writing for Esquire 
early in 1960 (a profile of Ingmar Berg- 
man), after having lived in France for al- 
most a decade, but he made his first signifi- 
cant mark in the magazine later that year in 
the “New York” issue. “Fifth Avenue, Up- 
town” (July 1960) was about his portion 
of the most famous boulevard in the Unit- 
ed States: 130th Street to 135th Street, his 
childhood neighborhood for a time and, 
in his mind, a hopeless ghetto. “Whatev- 
er money is now being earmarked to im- 



prove this, or any other ghetto, might as 
well be burnt.” 

This was the best piece Baldwin wrote 
for Esquire. He also wrote about his 
“friendship” with Norman Mailer (“The 
Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” May 
1961) and an essay about the word colored 
(“Color,” December 1962), notable for its 
restating of his view of the impossible gulf 
between black and white, along with a for- 
gettable essay about being an expatriate 
(“The New Lost Generation,” July 1961). 

But then he wrote something great: the 
essay that would become the centerpiece 
of The Fire Next Time. Unfortunately, he 
did not write it for Esquire. Which pissed 
off Esquire’s editor, Harold Hayes, who 
shortly thereafter— and possibly as a re- 
sult-assigned the Elkoff story, which was 
not entirely flattering. (“He seems strange- 
ly compelled to pop his eyes more when he 
knows he’s being photographed.”) Bald- 
win was mortified and allegedly threat- 
ened to sue. 

It would be eight years before he wrote 
again for Esquire. “Malcolm and Mar- 
tin” (April 1972) was nominally about the 
deaths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther 
King, but it was, in reality, a strangely beau- 


tiful account of a visit to his childhood best 
friend, still living in the house in which 
he’d been raised. The visit was occasioned 
by the friend asking him for the suit Bald- 
win had worn to King’s funeral. The suit 
became a stand-in for the guilt Baldwin 
felt for having succeeded, for having got- 
ten up and out, and his suspicion that he 
was an impostor. It was also the first time 
he hinted broadly at his sexuality. 

He wrote for the magazine one last time, 
in October 1980, an essay that despaired 
of the educational prospects of African- 
Americans. “The educational system of this 
country is, in short, designed to destroy the 
black child,” he wrote in “Dark Days.” But 
his most resonant work dates to his earli- 
est pieces for Esquire, when America was 
fresh and new to him after years in France. 

Today, when videos surface weekly of 
deadly encounters between white police- 
men and black citizens, Baldwin’s writing 
from the early 1960s can seem strikingly of 
the moment: “There are few things under 
heaven more unnerving,” he wrote of the 
police in “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” “than the 
silent, accumulating contempt and hatred 
ofapeople.” -DAVID GRANGER 


DUBIOUS 

ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS 

1992 

▼ 

YOUR USUAL TABLE 
MR. TYSON? 

Wang Guang’s restaurant in Sichuan, 
China, was cited for serving 
steamed buns stuffed with the meat 
of buttocks from human corpses. 



The Beatles^ the Great Depression, fatherhood (1933-2013)^ jai alai, Jimi Hendrix^ 

Marilyn Monroe (not the shaving cover— that was Virna Lisi. The pantless photo? Angie Dickinson), 

the magic of Broadway; the PT Cruiser, flavored vodka^ tea, gluten^ the Four Corners region 


@b 


Shazam the illustration of Baldwin to read "Fifth Avenue, Uptown." 


49 


BIN LADEN, 
OSAMA 

NATIONAL-SECURITY ENEMY NO. I for nearly twen- 
ty years and three presidents, and the subject of two major 
first-person accounts in Esquire— bookends, as it turned 
out— maybe the two most significant and vivid portraits 
of him ever published. 

The first was his last interview ever with an American 
journalist, in his mountain hideout inAfghanistan in 1998. 
^^Greetings, America. My Name Is Osama bin Laden/' 
by John Miller, February 1999: 

Osama bin Laden has a firm handshake. We exchanged 
pleasantries in the polite but stilted manner one uses 
when speaking through a translator. . . . 

“So we tell the Americans as people/’ bin Laden said 
softly, “and we tell the mothers of soldiers and Ameri- 
can mothers in general that if they value their lives and 
the lives of their children, to find a nationalistic govern- 
ment that will look after their interests and not the inter- 
ests of the Jews. The continuation of tyranny will bring 
the fight to America, as Ramzi Yousef and others did. ”. . . 

Ali [the translator] had been told to sit in the back 
of the room during the interview. When it was over, I 
went looking for him. “So, do we have a story?” I whis- 
pered when I found him. “Please tell me it wasn’t just 
an hour of ‘Praise Allah’ bullshit.” 

“No,” Ali said. “We have a very good story.” 

Today, remarkably. Miller is the deputy commission- 
er of intelligence and counterterrorism for the New York 
Police Department. 



®o 

To read John Miller's landmark story about his encounter with Osama bin Laden, 
Shazam the illustration above. 


EOURTEEN YEARS LATER, Esquire published the exclusive 
story of bin Laden’s last moments— a detailed account of the Navy 
SEAL mission to find him in 2012 and of his final acts and death 
by the SEAL who killed him, as told to journalist Phil Bronstein. 
"The Shooter," by Phil Bronstein, March 2013: 

I rolled past him into the room, just inside the doorway. 

There was bin Laden standing there. He had his hands on a 
woman’s shoulders, pushing her ahead, not exactly toward me 
but by me, in the direction of the hallway commotion. It was 
his youngest wife, Amal 


He looked confused. And way taller than I was expecting. ... He 
was holding her in front of him. Maybe as a shield, I don’t know. . . . 

In that second, I shot him, two times in the forehead. Bap! Bap! 
The second time as he’s going down. He crumpled onto the floor 
in front of his bed and I hit him again. Bap! same place. That time 
I used my EOTech red- dot holo sight. He was dead. Not moving. 
His tongue was out. I watched him take his last breaths, just a 
reflex breath. 

The shooter remained anonymous at his request in Bronstein’s 
story. A year later, he identified himself publicly as Robert O’Neill, 
now a motivational speaker and Fox News contributor. 



Blacktop, 
Two-Lane, and 
Other Bad Calls 


> "People who regard 
[Hitler] as an impulsive 
sentimentalist 
evidently have not 
watched his policy in 
his own country. ...It is 
safe to say that... Ger- 


many cannot go to war. 
MAY 1934 
> Bypassing The 
French Connection, 

A Clockwork Orange, 
and The Last Picture 
Show to name drag- 
racing film Two-Lane 
Blacktop, which 
starred James Taylor 
and Beach Boy Dennis 


Wilson, our 1971 
Movie of the Year 
(left). And publishing 
all 23,202 words of the 
screenplay. 

APRIL 1971 

> Sam Worthington, 
"The Greatest Actor of 
Our Time?" 
SEPTEMBER 2009 

> Directing readers to 


short Apple stock 
two years before the 
iPhone debuted. 
MARCH 2005 
> Predicting future 
convicted war criminal 
(and son of Muammar) 
Saif al-lslam el-Qaddafi 
would peacefully bring 
democracy to Libya. 
OCTOBER 2008 


50 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


ILLUSTRATION BY DOUGLAS MacRAE 








Blue Box, Secrets of the Little 

October 1971 (see JOBS, STEVE). 

Ron Rosenbaum’s electrifying story about 
phone phreaks, which turned into the 
“foundation event” for the creation of 
Apple Computer. Rosenbaum described 
the subculture of young telephone hack- 
ers whose “blue boxes” permitted them 
to manipulate the multifrequency tones 
of the international telephone system and 
place free calls around the world. 

Steve Wozniak, then a twenty-one-year- 
old student at Berkeley, read the story in 
his mother’s kitchen. Contributing editor 
A. J. Jacobs recentiy taiked with Wozniak 
about what happened next. 

“I was so grabbed by the article,” Woz- 
niak says today. “I called Steve Jobs before 
I was halfway through and started read- 
ing him passages.” 

Jobs was then a sixteen-year- old high 
school student and a fellow tech-head. At 
first, they thought the story was fiction. But 
in a tech library they found a journal article 
that listed the little-known frequencies. “It 
was like. Oh my God.” Wozniak became ob- 
sessed. “I had a manual typewriter,” he says, 
“and I ret 5 q)ed the entire article, every single 
word, in case I lost the original.” He tracked 
down the most famous phone phreak in 
Rosenbaum’s piece, nicknamed “Captain 
Crunch” because he reproduced frequen- 
cies using a whistle found in Cap’n Crunch 
cereal boxes. Wozniak invited him to visit. “I 
imagined him as some suave woman’s guy,” 
he says. “He showed up and he was much 
more of a geek. He smelled like he hadn’t 
taken a shower in a while.” 

Wozniak designed his own blue box that 
improved on the others. It was Jobs’s idea 
to make a business selling it to other stu- 
dents. It became their first business. 

“I keep my most precious memorabilia 
in my home office,” says Wozniak. “The 
Esquire article is right next to the official 
document when Apple went public. I’m 
looking at it right now.” 



Buckley, William F. Jr. 

See CAN’T TALK ABOUT THAT. 



GOOD WRITERS AND BAD WRITERS LOVED PUGS, EVEN 
IN THE DAYS WHEN THEY WERE JUST PUGS 


IN THE PREMIERE ISSUE OF ESQUIRE, IN 1933-eighty-seven pages behind 
Hemingway’s debut— former heavyweight champion Gene Tunney defended his 
love for literature. The article was titled “Overture: Poet and Pug.” He wrote, de- 
spairingly, that many people thought the joining of “brains and brawn” was “incon- 
gruous; it is out of the natural proletarian order of our world, and they look upon 
me, the pugilist who reads poetry, as neither fish, flesh nor fowl.” That great theme, 
poet and pug, came to underlie much of the magazine’s worst writing on boxing— 
Roger Kahn, in a piece about Ingemar Johansson’s knockout of Eloyd Patterson in 
1960: “How can he be a fighter and a lover both? / the fight men asked. The fight 
men /who did not understand violence”— as it did much of the best. 

Esquire published boxers in their own words— whether it was Tunney’s “long 
count” title-bout foe Jack Dempsey in 1934 or George Foreman and Joe Frazier in 
“What I’ve Learned” interviews in 2004— and its writers turned to them compul- 
sively as subjects (Marciano by Gerald Kersh, Liston by Joe Flaherty, and Tyson 
three times— by Pete Hamill and Mark Kram and Tom Junod). Two became fas- 
cinations. The first: Joe Louis, “the Othello of boxing,” so named by Frank Scully 
in the magazine in 1935; later simply called “the Champ.” As Louis rose, the mag- 
azine lionized and defended him, its spotlight even falling onto those surround- 
ing him— his promoter, his underpaid spectacular sparring partner, both worthy of 


®o 


Shazam the illustration in the top left corner of the page to read "Secrets of the Little Blue Box." 


52 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


ILLUSTRATION BY JOE McKENDRY 



MOVADO 

MODERN AHEAD OF ITS TIME 


^ovado 


NEW MOVADO BOLD® INK 

SHADES OF MIDNIGHT. 
SWISS QUARTZ CHRONOGRAPH. 

MOVADO.COM 


SAKS FIFTH AVENUE 





investigation because of their proximity to him— though it would always return to 
Louis himself, even in 1962, a decade after his retirement, when Gay Talese (see) 
spent an afternoon sitting at his kitchen table with his third wife while Louis napped: 
“The King as a Middle-Aged Man.” 

Within a year, though, the fascination shifted to Cassius Clay: Tom Wolfe (see)— 
in his first piece to be published in Esquire, in 1963— described “the Marvelous Mouth” 
and his “foxes” as they paraded through New York City before the Liston fight, call- 
ing Clay’s claim to be the greatest “a piece of outrageous bombast.” Proven wrong, 
Esquire followed with the cover-story defense of his bombast in 1966 by Floyd Pat- 
terson himself (with Talese); and the iconic ’68 cover portrait of him impaled by six 
arrows, “The Passion of Muhammad Ali,” accompanying a story by Leonard Shecter; 
and its ’69 defense of his refusal to fight, by Irwin Shaw (“Justice in America, it turns 
out, is considerably more selective than Selective Service”), along with its list of 104 
people who believed Ali should be allowed to defend his title (which spanned from 
a U. S. senator to Kurt Vonnegut to, yes, Joe Louis); and Ali’s own premature 1970 es- 
say, titled “I’m Sorry, but I’m Through F ighting Now.” Ali, the great boxing paradigm, 
helped define the magazine then, and even now (see THE MEN OF OUR TIME, page 
158). Decades later, in 2004, alongside Foreman’s and Frazier’s, Ali’s own words ap- 
peared again in the magazine. They included a poem. -NATE HOPPER 



Butts, 

a Few Words About 

Forty-three years ago, 
Nora Ephron wrote an es- 
say for this magazine en- 
titled "A Few Words About 
Breasts," in which she ex- 
plored the impact be- 
ing small-breasted had 
on her psyche. I cried 
when she passed, both 
because I loved that she 
made me feel less alone 
and because the things 
I feel alone about are al- 
ways evolving. 

When I was a teenag- 
er, I was so worried about 
my flat chest that I didn't 
think about my butt. In 
fairness, it was the eight- 
ies. How was I to know 
that one day, coke would 
be replaced with molly 
and boobs would be over- 
shadowed by butts? 

In my head, God had 
put our butts in the back 
because we weren't sup- 
posed to worry about 
them. In reality, our butts 
were in the back so men 
could talk about them 
without us knowing, un- 
til it was too late and we'd 


already spent our whole 
lives eating balls of mozza- 
rella as if they were apples. 

Large breasts were the 
goal, and when I had an 
unexpected Hail Mary 
boob growth spurt at the 
ripe old age of twenty- 
one, I relaxed; I believed 
I now had all the equip- 
ment I needed to be con- 
sidered Desirable.™ Unfor- 
tunately, that same year 
Out of Sight was released 
and Jennifer Lopez be- 
came a superstar. It was 
the cultural tipping point 
for butts. I suddenly real- 
ized that men would be 
or— holy fuck— had been 
concerned about butts 
for years. I found myself 
turning around in front of 
a three-way mirror, really 
trying to see my own ass 
for the first time. It filled all 
three of the mirrors. 

I have a softish, curvy, 
'70s-Jewish-mom body. 
I'm in my late thirties (the 
very latest ones), and my 
butt is kind of a vague 
trapezoid. I know Gwyn- 
eth Paltrow said her butt 
is her least favorite body 
part also, but I think we 
all know she is full of shit, 
even though I have both 
of her cookbooks and buy 
every magazine she's on 
the cover of and some- 
times think of her right 
before I go to sleep. 

So after fifteen years 
of hand-wringing over 
my breasts, I've shifted 
course to agonizing over 


how to mold my ass into 
the shape of two levitating 
tennis balls (the current 
ideal). I bought a ten-pack 
of Bar Method classes on 
the recommendation of a 
friend who developed an 
eating disorder before her 
wedding. I've hired per- 
sonal trainers, bought Jil- 
lian Michaels DVDs, and 
even downloaded a very 
sad-looking app called, 
quite unimaginatively. 

Butt Workout. Through it 
all, my ass has stubbornly 
remained the same. 

And therein lies the 
difference between 
possessing great tits and 
possessing a great ass. 

If you're unhappy with 
your breasts, you just feel 
unlucky. If you're unhap- 
py with your butt, it's your 
fault because you're lazy. 
Why don't you just try 
harder? In my case, it's 
because I literally do not 
have the physical strength 
required to create a Jenni- 
fer Lopez ass. I do seem 
to have the strength to 

1) drink chardonnay and 

2) watch The Bachelorette. 

You might suggest that 

there are still breast men 
out there, but unfortu- 
nately I accidentally mar- 
ried an ass man. Some- 
how we're making it work. 

The moral of this sto- 
ry is Women can't win. We 
should quit. 

(Actually— I forgot 
about Sofia Vergara. She 
wins.) -JESSI KLEIN 




Campbell, E. Simms 

It’s tempting to call E. Simms Campbell 
the Jackie Robinson of magazine illustra- 
tors. Just as Robinson broke the color line in 
baseball, Campbell broke down barriers in 
publishing when, starting with the debut is- 
sue of Esquire, he became the first black art- 
ist to contribute regularly to a mainstream 
American magazine. But what’s equally tell- 
ing about Campbell’s talent is that he could 
just as rightly be called the Lou Gehrig 
of magazine illustrators, since Campbell 
had the distinction of appearing in every 
issue of Esquire from the day it launched 
in 1933 to the time of his death in 1971. 



54 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


@b 


Shazam the photo above left to read Nora Ephron's "A Few Words About Breasts." 


ILLUSTRATION BY JOE McKENDRY; PHOTO: EOTOGRAEIA BASICA/GETTY 




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Notoriously prolific, he contributed hun- 
dreds of smart, funny, provocative cartoons 
and lush watercolor illustrations (some of 
them covers, like the one on the previous 
page from February 1948) over four decades, 

I and indeed also wrote dozens of stories and 
essays for the magazine. From early on, 
Campbell and his work were central to Es- 
quire’s sensibility and idea of itself, and it was 
Campbell who created the magazine’s imp- 
ish man-about-town mascot, Esky Arnold 
Gingrich, Esquire’s founding editor, credit- 
ed Campbell with a “direct and immediate 
bearing on the magazine’s initial success.” 

Born in St. Louis, Campbell studied art in 
Chicago before moving to New York, where 
he and his family made their home in Har- 
lem in its heyday, and where he became 
a fixture in the legendary nightlife there, 
keeping late hours with Cab Calloway and 
Dizzy Gillespie. 

Campbell eventually concluded that 
the color line, though it could be crossed, 
was by no means erased, and by the late 
fifties he’d moved his family to Switzer- 
land, where, as he put it, “I can walk into 
any joint I want out here and nobody starts 
looking as if they’re thinking, ‘Ugh, there’s 
a nigger in here.’ ” 

He continued to send his work in from 
Europe, meeting his deadline, and delight- 
ing readers, every month. 

Can't Talk About That 

See LIBEL. 


CARS 

ONCE LIT THE IMAGINATION OF MEN (AND MAGAZINES) 


FROM 1934 TO 1955, ESQUIRE’S CAR correspondent was abroad-shouldered 
Russian immigrant named Alexis de Sakhnoffsky. He was a journalist second and 
an artist first, a designer for art- deco carmakers like Auburn, Cord, and Packard. 
His illustrations for the magazine were all Buck Rogers glamour and hope— not just 
cars but trains and furniture and countless other imagined futures. He sketched race 
cars that didn’t exist, production cars that did, and everything in between, each one 
streaking across the landscape of a better future. (See above.) At its best, his work 
was the imaginary moments and tools of a world we didn’t have, but wanted. 

Amelia Earhart had a Cord. It was a big, long, expensive thing, with an elephan- 
tine hood and hand-built door tops that 
came nearly to chest height. Like Auburn 
or Packard or Sakhnoffsky himself, it fit the 
age. Packard built the first mass-produc- 
tion V-12 because we once believed such 
things— two six-cylinder engines joined at 
the hip!— to be necessary. You can almost 
hear the shrugging defense: It’s not like the 


Cartoons 


Pick the original hilarious 
caption to this cartoon from 
the first issue of Esquire! 


“How much talcum 
powder did you cut 
that shit with?" 


“Damn these mango 
habanero wings ” 


C 

“Furball?" 


“Darling, what—kachoo— 
difference does age— 
kachoo—make anyway?" 


■Q UHOia s.iVHi a si Noiidvo snoiaviiH ioaaaoo 3Hi :a3MSNV 


place is getting any smaller. 

Only it did. 

The road, once a symbol of the un- 
known, is now seen as a traffic- clogged 
obstacle; machines that were once a 
meld of art and science are now mostly 
just math, dictated by climate and safe- 
ty. There was a whimsy to the automo- 
bile, and travel, that we’ve lost. A sense 
of possibility, like the early days of avi- 
ation, brought about by a lack of rules. 
In their place, we’re left with some- 
thing more useful and less deadly, but 
maybe not intrinsically better. Toyota 
Camrys that can outrun Earhart’s Cord 
but offer zero art or [cont'd on page 58] 


56 ESQUIRE -OCTOBER 2015 


CARS: ALEXIS DE SAKHNOEESKY; CARTOON: GEORGE PETTY 




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[CONT'D FROM PAGE 56] allure. Mercedes- 
Benz S- Classes that will steer and acceler- 
ate for you, nearly autonomous, because 
that’s what people want now. Not driving. 

We still see romance in the vastness, but 
the fantasy is tempered by knowing exact- 
ly what’s out there. Not that we don’t have 
it in us. Modern cars are engineered by 
committee and computer, but they start 
off with pen and paper, because that’s 
how artists work. Designers still do full- 
size “walkaround” models of future ve- 
hicles in artist’s clay, because they know 
the fuzzy logic— how a shape makes you 
feel when you walk up to it— is a big part 
of the draw. There are a few geniuses, men 
like Jaguar’s Ian Callum, or Ralph Gilles 
at Fiat Chrysler, who believe, and push, 
for what Sakhnoffsky wanted. And the 
marker he laid: the idea that machinery is 
never so important as what we do with it. 

-SAM SMITH 



Carver, Raymond 

Janitor. Textbook editor. Salesman. Saw- 
miller. Published numerous, now-classic 
short stories in Esquire, beginning with this 
one, ''Neighbors, ’’from June 1 971 : 

“Don’t worry,” he said into her ear. “For 
God’s sake, don’t worry.” They stayed 
there. They held each other. They leaned 
into the door as if against the wind, and 
braced themselves. 


DUBIOUS 

ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS 

2000 


BUT ROD STEIGER’S 
SNORING SCARES 
THE MONKEY 

About his relationship with 
Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson 
said, “She’s a warm, cuddly 
blanket that I love to snuggle up to 
and cover myself with.” 


Catastrophe 

ALONG WITH WAR (SEE), THE ENDURING SUBJEGT 
OF SOME OF THE MAGAZINE’S BEST WRITING 


> Wild rumors began to 
circulate about the out- 
side world. It was said that 
Chicago had slid into Lake 
Michigan; that Manhat- 
tan Island had been sub- 
merged; that all the Pacific 
Coast cities were in ruins. 
In this blazing inferno, 
such stories as these cre- 
ated only mild surprise. 
—"The Great Disaster 

of 1906/’ about the 
San Francisco fire, by 
Paul T. MacFarland, 
October 1945 

> One air tank was dead, 
leaving only a few wisps 
of oxygen for Lucey and 
Brotherton to share, al- 
ternating shallow breaths 
through one mask. When a 
tank has two minutes of air 
left in it, the mask vibrates 
like a gentle air hammer. 
When the last breath is ab- 
sorbed, the mask imme- 
diately turns into a vacu- 
um, sucking hard against 
the face and tearing at 
the lungs, forcing a man 
to yank it off or die gasp- 
ing. Once it's off, the on- 
ly thing left to breathe is 
smoke, which consists of 
carbon monoxide and, de- 
pending on what's burn- 
ing, anywhere from a few 
dozen to a few thousand 
toxic chemicals, including 
hydrogen cyanide and hy- 
drochloric acid. 

—"The Perfect Fire/’ 
about the 1999 Worces- 
ter, Massachusetts, 
warehouse fire, by Sean 
Flynn, July 2000 

> Radio contact ceased. 
Temperatures in the 
cockpit were rising pre- 
cipitously; aluminum fix- 
tures began to melt. It's 
possible that one of the 
pilots, or both, simply 
caught fire. At air-traffic 
control in Moncton, the 
green hexagon flickered 
off the screen. There was 
silence. They knew what 
was coming: the huge 
fuck, the something terri- 


ble. God save them. 

One controller began 
trembling, another wept. 
It was falling. 

—"The Long Fall of 
One- Eleven Heavy," 
about the crash of Swiss- 
air Fiight 111, by Michael 
Paterniti, July 2000 

> They jumped through 
windows already broken 
and then, later, through 
windows they broke 
themselves. They jumped 
to escape the smoke and 
the fire; they jumped 
when the ceilings fell and 
the floors collapsed; they 
jumped just to breathe 
once more before they 
died. They jumped con- 
tinually, from all four 
sides of the building, and 
from all floors above and 
around the building's fa- 
tal wound. They jumped 
from the offices of Marsh 
& McLennan, the insur- 
ance company; from the 
offices of Cantor Fitzger- 
ald, the bond-trading 
company; from Windows 
on the World, the res- 
taurant on the 106th and 
107th floors— the top. For 
more than an hour and a 
half, they streamed from 
the building, one after an- 
other, consecutively rath- 
er than en masse, as if 
each individual required 
the sight of another in- 
dividual jumping before 
mustering the courage to 
jump himself or herself. 
—"The Falling Man," 
byTom Junod, 
September 2003 

> Amina cried and cried. 

I have to save this child, 
Zalina thought. She 
opened her dress and 
placed a nipple un- 
der Amina's nose. Zali- 
na was forty-one years 
old and not the tod- 
dler's mother. But she 
thought that maybe Am- 
ina was young enough, 
and a warm nipple famil- 
iar enough, that any nip- 


ple, even her dry nipple, 
would provide comfort. 
Naked and sweaty, Amina 
took the breast. She be- 
gan to suck. Her breath- 
ing slowed. Her body re- 
laxed. She fell asleep. 

Be still, Zalina thought. 

Be still. 

—"The School," about 
the takeover of a school 
in Beslan, Russia, by 
Chechen terrorists, by 
C. J. Chivers, June 2006 

>The tornado stretches 
twenty thousand feet in- 
to the sky. It is three quar- 
ters of a mile wide. It is 
not empty. 

It is carrying two-by- 
fours and drywall and 
automobiles. 

It is carrying baseball 
cards, laptop computers, 
family photo albums. 

It is carrying people, as 
naked as newborns, their 
clothes stripped away like 
tissue paper. 

It is carrying fragments 
of the Walmart where 
Carl and Jennifer met, of 
the church where Don- 
na worships, of three of 
the nursing homes where 
Lacey works. 

It has traveled six miles 
through the city, and now 
it is carrying a great deal 
of the city within itself. 

Michaela pushes Tin- 
kerbell's head down, but 
she can feel her squir- 
relly little neck straining 
against her hand, wanting 
to look up, wanting to see. 
—"’Heavenly Father!’ 

’I love you all!’ ’I love 
everyone!’ ’Jesus! Jesus! 
Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! 
Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Je- 
sus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! 
Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!’ ’I 
love all of you!’ ’’ about 
the 2011 Joplin, Mis- 
souri, tornado, by Luke 
Dittrich, October 2011 


TURN THE PAGE TO 
READ THE TRUE STORY OF 
THE HUNT FOR 
MALAYSIA AIR 370. 


58 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


To read Raymond Carver's short story "Neighbors," Shazam his illustration. 


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BY BLCKY MemTON-^ 



THE ROARING FORTIES 

this white slab to the tongue 
ke the Holy Eucharist. This 
^ body, t or sixteen months, the Boe- 
77 wing flap sailed the Indian Ocean 
, meandering and eddying, speeding 
id slowing unpredictably, before mak- 
mdfall on Reunion Island off the east 
: of Africa in July. If you were to beat 
against the current, following the flap 
ludged along for more than flve hun- 
days— reverse drift modeling, admit- 
tedly an inexact science— you would inter- 
sect with a tiny flotilla of ships twenty-flve 
hundred miles away, each piloting a pre- 
cisely programmed path. 

Over the past year and a half, the search 
for Malaysia Air 370 has devolved from 
a massive international military effort— 
Malaysian, Chinese, American, and Aus- 
tralian planes and ships scouringthe South 
China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, the west 
Indian Ocean— into something quite small 
and focused, just a handful of technical ex- 
perts and seasoned mariners flfteen hun- 
dred miles off the west coast of Australia. 
These men, this team, on these ships, in the 
wind-tormented wilderness of the Roaring 
Forties, one of the most treacherous and 
isolated stretches of ocean on the planet, 
a place where flve-story waves rise out of 
sudden cyclones and the nearest land is a 
weeklongboat ride away. 

Zoom in. Zoom out. Use all your devices 
with all appropriate apps. Say you are here. 
You want to go there. You cannot go there. 

Begin, then, by imagining outer space. Be- 
ware the thousands of near-earth-orbit sat- 
ellites weaving a basketry of reconnaissance 
around our blue planet. Little shutterbugs, 
little spies. Soar higher, to twenty-two thou- 


The view from the bow of the Discovery, one of 
three Fugro vessels leading the search for 
MH370 in the Roaring Forties, one of the most 
dangerous and remote oceans in the world. 



sand miles above earth, to that sweet spot 
where escape velocity meshes with grav- 
ity. Here’s our hovering guardian angel, a 
south Indian Ocean satellite, shooting a 
spot beam— a two-way data conduit hired 
at a high price— down to a ship. Follow the 
beam until you see the vessel’s wake, mak- 
ing a beeline from its port south of Perth in 
Western Australia. Meet the Fugro Equator. 

The Equator has made a quick turn- 
around in port— enough time to refuel, re- 
supply, sign out an exhausted crew and take 
on a fresh one— and now the early days at sea 
are a chance to catch up, tell stories, be re- 
absorbed into the shipboard tribe. If they’re 
efficient, they can knock out their setup 
and kick it a bit. Store up sleep as a miser 
hoards gold. Where the Equator is headed, 
bad weather is a near certainty, with the 
likelihood of something really awful. 

The vessel can take it. It’s nearly brand-new (2012), a two- 
hundred-foot steel-hulled purpose-built survey ship, incredi- 
bly robust and extraordinarily smart— a fioating computer center 
with the lines of a superyacht. Fugro, a Netherlands-based com- 
pany, is the world’s largest marine survey firm. Its ships are the 
best its clients can afford, and since clients are typically multi- 
national oil and gas companies, that means the best ships money 
can buy. For this mission, though, when all the bureaucratic ac- 
ronyms are parsed and linked— from Perth to Canberra to Kua- 
la Lumpur, to China and Europe, the U. S. and the U. N.— Fugro’s 
client is humankind. A poor relation, you might say. But money 
has been no object so far. 

At the end of March 2014, Australia took the lead in the sot 
Indian Ocean search, declaring the waters to be its responsit 
ity. In the words of treasurer Joe Hockey, “We’re not a coun 
that begs others for money to do our job,” and true to its pled 
the government set aside $65 million to finance what was I 
coming the most expensive search in aviation history. In A 
gust, Fugro landed a contract for $44 million to spearhead t . 
underwater search. Fugro project director Paul Kennedy and 
managing director Steve Duffield, both based in Perth, had carte 
blanche to scour the planet for the most effective technology— “all 
the best kit,” as the Australians say. They paid a million for each 
EdgeTech sonar device. Another million for each Dynacon winch. 
They consulted with experts from all over the world and set up 
an elaborate data stream to maximize the number of brilliant sci- 
entific eyes scrutinizing pixels. 

Kennedy, who has thirty years of offshore experience, calls the 
south Indian Ocean a miserable place to be. And though the crews 
work twelve -hour shifts, he knows most will work much longer 
hours. Out of dedication, yes, but also because sleep is nearly im- 
possible on a violently tossing ship. You can brace yourself while 
you work; it’s when you try to relax that you compound effort 
with futility. It’s tough, he says, really tough. The crews of the 
three Fugro ships engaged in the search for MH370— the Equa- 
tor, the Discovery, and the Supporter— ave battling fatigue under 
the most challenging conditions: executing the deepest and most 
detailed ocean survey ever attempted. 

But this is much more than a survey; it’s an active murder inqui- 


ry. Somewhere down there, perhaps more than three miles down, 
perhaps partially intact or shattered into a thousand pieces and 
tangled in a rat’s nest of wires, is what’s left of MH370. And pos- 
sibly the victims, too. Two hundred and thirty-nine souls. Moth- 
ers, fathers, lovers. Calligraphy artists and technical wizards. A 
two-year-old boy. Predominantly Chinese, they also include cit- 
izens of fourteen nations. They are connected by heartstrings to 
thousands, by lesser bonds of profession and acquaintance per- 
haps to millions. They await the only rescue left to them: the re- 
turn to their loved ones, and the world of the known. 

NETS 

Lcient culture conceived a net, a multidimensional grid 
with a place for everything and everyone, living or dead. The 
ran their earthly course between Olympus and Hades 
the surveillance of the Fates, clothiers of mortality who 
spun out destinies, measured their lengths, and cut them short. 

et, the Hindu weave, is a more static, more placid grid. 

s ad infinitum in all directions. At each interstice is a 

jewel refiecting all the other jewels, a hall of mirrors extending 
endlessly outward and endlessly inward simultaneously, the most 
colossal of colossi coexisting with the minutest of the minus- 
cule— which also seems to be true of this enigmatic planet here 
and now. Or so we dream, and perhaps subliminally remember. 

But this I take to be fact: The beginning of technology was the 
knot— E pluribus unum— and the knot begat the net. And off we 
went, with that inborn mythological compulsion to guide us on 
our journey of joinery until we actually built the fucker on a global 
scale. Yet the twenty-first- century net we have built— nets with- 
in nets within nets— only exists where necessity demands it or 
profit supports it. At every crossroads is a meter ticking. And still 
it comforts us, even as it harries us. Our connecting screens, like 
the jewels of Indra’s Net, contain colossi of information borne on 
invisible waves, the unseen resolving into pixels, pixels into im- 
age and text, the world at our fingertips. We capture every mo- 
ment as it drifts into the past, and the data piles up behind us in 
a monolithic information cloud so big that even when we think 
we’re out from under it, we are not quite free. Some part of us 
still links to it, like electric sparks jumping across a Tesla coil. 


62 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


THIS PAGE AND PRECEDING PAGES: ABIS CHRIS BEERENS, RAN 




One of the million-dollar "tow fish" Fugro is using to survey the ocean floor. Along with a side-scan transducer, which maps the ocean floor by using sound vibrations, 
the Fish is equipped with a front-mounted collision-avoidance system and a hydrocarbon "sniffer" used by Fugro's other clients to find oil and gas. 


As it taxied down the runway a little after midnight on March 8, 
2014, the Boeing 777 of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the red-eye 
from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, was enmeshed within nets of com- 
munication and navigation systems and the Internet of Things— 
machines autonomously signaling to machines. The weather was 
clear; the pilot, fifty-three-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was expe- 
rienced and well-respected; the six-and-a-half-hour flight should’ve 
been a routine matter of climbing to cruising altitude, switching to 
autopilot, and following a programmed course. Less than an hour 
after takeoff, airborne at thirty-five thousand feet over the South 
China Sea, the cockpit signed off with Kuala Lumpur air traffic con- 
trol: “All right. Good night, Malaysia Three Seven Zero.” 

But Three Seven Zero never made the expected contact with 
Vietnamese air traffic control at Ho Chi Minh City. Instead, it made 
a hard left turn and flew back over Malaysia. Erratic, incomprehen- 
sible, a swooping, panicky journey of wrongturns, bad choices (or 
no choices), a night torturously prolonged and indeed never quite 
terminated— that was the flight of MH370. Then it disappeared. 

In the aftermath of the 2009 Air France crash and other sea 
crashes, aircraft debris littered the ocean, leaving a trace easily 
seen from the air. But here, no wreckage was found. 

And then, a week later, with the trail gone cold, Inmarsat, the 
U.K.-based satellite company, asserted that for an astonishing 
and confounding six additional hours after the last radar con- 
tact, machine communicated with machine, the airliner sending 
“pings” to the Indian Ocean region geostationary satellite twen- 
ty-two thousand miles above, in space. 

These “pings,” also called “handshakes” or “heartbeats,” con- 
tain very little real information. They are simply the aircraft tell- 
ing the satellite, “I’m still here” (but not where); it means “We’re 
still in business, so don’t give away my slot.” Someone in the cock- 
pit must have disabled the plane’s AGARS (Aircraft Communi- 
cations Addressing and Reporting System), which can be done 
with the flip of a switch. But the AGARS is a layered system, and 
to disable the autonomous system below, a saboteur would have 
had to root around in the sub -cabin-floor electronics. Most pilots 
don’t even know this backup system exists, according to avion- 
ics experts. So whether the primary AGARS was intentionally or 
catastrophically disabled, the aircraft and the satellite— Inmar- 
sat-3 FI— kept up their conversation through six hourly hand- 
shakes and a final, partial seventh handshake. Out of sequence, 
the seventh ping foretold imminent disaster. 

It was a “Log-on Request,” which means that even the auton- 
omous layer of the AGARS had broken contact with the satellite 
after what must have been a total electrical failure due to fuel ex- 
haustion. MH370 was trying to sign on anew with the satellite, 
make a fresh start with a new power source. 

A Boeing 777 has a last-ditch device, deployed from the belly of 
the plane behind the wing: the ram air turbine, or RAT. The RAT 
is a little power plant, a small windmill that can generate enough 
juice to turn on vital systems, like the satellite transponder. Out 
of gas but still gliding, the aircraft reached out to the electronic 
grid one last time, one final brief burst of information— MH370’s 
true last words— and then it really disappeared. 

There wasn’t much data to crunch: only about six hundred 
bytes total, equivalent to a few text messages. From plane to sat- 
ellite, from satellite to ground station in Perth— here were elec- 


tronic beams like the two arms of a compass, good for drawing a 
circle but not a net to catch the plane. Inmarsat experts, work- 
ing in conjunction with a formidable global brain trust, deduced 
from the seventh ping a Seventh Arc— a 2,485-mile-long curve, the 
most probable piece of the circle. By considering possible plane 
speeds, flight range, reported winds, parameters of aircraft per- 
formance, frequency variations in the satellite data, even the min- 
ute temperature effect on the satellite as it passed through a brief 
lunar eclipse, the investigative team homed in on the section of 
the arc that was most likely the crash site. By the best calculations 
of the best minds, the plane should have fallen somewhere along 
the southern end of the Seventh Arc, in the south Indian Ocean. 

Until that wing flap washed up on Reunion Island off the 
east coast of Africa, there was no more information. No surveil- 
lance photos of contrails. Here, even near-earth satellites blink 
as they pass by. These empty latitudes are their recharge zone, 
their scheduled downtime. They look where they have business, 
and since there’s nobody here, nothing to see, they sail by blindly. 
Now it’s up to the Equator to look, through a miles- deep veil, as 
it battles the sea in the loneliest place on earth. 

A FISH NAMED HOPE 

Maybe you have to be Australian to get it, with a continent of 
empty waste at your back, and spend some years in Western Aus- 
tralia especially, looking across the Indian Ocean toward Afri- 
ca, but Paul Kennedy isn’t at all amazed that something as large 
as a Boeing 777 could disappear without a trace. No, not at all, he 
says. Things go missing. 

Go out to Rottnest Island, just nine miles offshore, he says, and 
there’s no cell-phone reception. Go out another thirty miles and 
there’s no TV, no radio. It’s very quiet. The silence is almost deaf- 
ening. Kennedy considers the vastness of the Indian Ocean, the 
satellite blackout— before Fugro paid up to turn on abeam— and 
he considers the speck that is a plane, even a 777, and he says: No. 
No, it’s not surprising. But in this case, it is unacceptable. 

Trim, tan, as bald as Captain Picard with a similarly deep, res- 
onant voice, the fifty-year- old Kennedy radiates confidence. He 
has “command presence”; you think of someone in the mold of 
Shackleton, at which he would surely laugh. But PK, as all the 
crews call him, is on top of every aspect of the search. Stump any- 
body on the ships and they’ll say, “Ask PK. PK’ll know.” The crews 
carry that confidence with them to the Seventh Arc. 

On illustrative maps, the Seventh Arc appears as a curved rec- 
tilinear box divided into a grid of numbered squares compris- 
ing about forty-six thousand square miles, a little larger than a 
sunken Pennsylvania. Navigating with a network of GPS satel- 
lites that can accurately determine its location to within two to 
four inches, the Equator reaches the spot on the grid where the 
previous team left off and can resume adding detail to the map 
in progress. Now the work can begin. 

Everyone is at his station. The captain (or master, as he is called) 
is up on the bridge at the ship’s controls. The surveyors are at 
their computers nearby, ready to direct him to keep the ship on 
the new line. The geophysicists are at their banks of computers 
down in the belly of the ship, running a checkup on their soft- 
ware. The data processors await the stream of information. The 
party chief, in charge of the sixteen-man survey crew— the scien- 


63 


tists and technicians and engineers— is making his rounds, tak- 
ing the pulse of morale and assessing the readiness of the gear. 
Worrying, that’s what the party chief does. 

Think of the Equator as a floating brain— abrain with a six-mile- 
long feeler. It’s God’s own USB connector, that marvel of a whis- 
ker, a one-inch-thick steel-armored cable at the heart of which is 
a flber-optic filament finer than a human hair. The company that 
makes this cable also provides cables for NASA rockets and Nas- 
car racers, machines that transmit data under the most extreme 
conditions man can tempt. The high-tech cord is coiled up on a 
giant reel, which is controlled by a massive traction winch pow- 
ered by a truck engine. The apparatus at the steel whisker’s tip, 
a coffin-sized box ingeniously crammed with electronics, is the 
“tow fish,” or simply “the Fish.” 

The Fish is the ship’s remote eyes, ears, and nose, and on this 
ship it’s inscribed with a name, Spero: Hope. Because the Fish 
named Hope floats, it is tethered to a lead-filled “depressor” 
weighing half a ton— a nod to Iron Age tech. Now men in hard hats 
and fluorescent jumpsuits, wearing harnesses and tension lines 
securing them to the swaying ship, steady the Fish as it’s hoisted 
aloft. Then Fish and sinker ride out over the stern rail, swaying 
beneath the extendable hydraulic A-frame (just the thing for 
just that job). As the cable pays out, the Fish smacks the surface 
and then, following the tug of the depressor, begins its descent. 

THE GREAT COMPUTER GAME 

The surface of the sea is a skin; we hardly think of the fruit, the 
heavy heaving jelly, its gigantic volume and incredible weight, its 
perpetual darkness. So when Fugro signed on to And the plane, 
it was essentially working blind. The only chart of the south In- 
dian Ocean seafloor was a “gravity” map, a soft-focus estimate of 
depth shot from a satellite (that and Captain Cook’s soundings 
from 1792). Job one for the Equator was a general bathymetric 
map— an underwater topological survey— of fifty-seven thou- 
sand square miles straddling the line of the Seventh Arc. You have 
to build the foundation before you can build the house, manag- 
ing director Steve Duffleld explains. Along with a Chinese ship, 
the Zhu Kezhen, the Equator “mowed the lawn,” shooting sound 
waves from the ship’s multibeam sonar. The monthslong survey 
produced an excellent map of depths, and seafloor hardness, and 
specific seabed features— just not good enough to And an airplane. 

But what a sunken world that map reveals! The Seventh Arc 
transits undersea mountains comparable to the Alps, in terrain 
that plunges from ten thousand feet below to fifteen thousand. A 
section of the Equator’s new deepwater bailiwick includes Broken 
Ridge, part of the rift where Australia ripped away from Antarcti- 
ca, the violent topography harkingback to Gondwana. The Broken 
Ridge’s near-vertical walls drop down into a canyon grander than 
the Grand— a crack in the crust of the earth where the aliens live, 
as Duffleld sometimes jokes at barbecues. The rift is a geological 
hot zone, with “black smokers” spouting boiling chemical brews, 
the adjacent abyssal plain studded with volcanoes. It’s a true Lost 
World, like somewhere out of an H. Rider Haggard novel. It’s of- 
ten said we know less about the bottom of the sea than the surface 
of Mars. Yes, indeed, because it costs more to look. If time is mon- 
ey, then time in the abyss is money squared. 

Without that map, the Equator would surely have towed the 
Fish into a mountainside. Now, as the traction winch grinds and 
the cable pays out, the Fish slowly descends into terrain that’s 


supremely challenging but at least somewhat known. And de- 
scends, and descends. The blue of the bathyal zone bleeds in- 
to the black of the abyssal, the light winks out to perfect pitch, 
and the dark goes on and on, for eight monotonous hours. At 
last the tow supervisor hears from the Fish, which tells him 
that it’s within optimal viewing range— about five hundred feet 
above the bottom. Now the Fish deploys its sonar arrays and 
begins absorbing and transmitting megabytes of the most rar- 
efied knowledge. 

But let us pause for a moment to appreciate this feat of engi- 
neering as art. How the cable extends two yards in length for 
every yard of depth until the weight of the cable and the de- 
pressor matches the velocity of the ship to form a perfect par- 
abolic arc. Eight thousand yards of cable, four thousand yards 
of depth, say, constantly recalibrated via the winch, or by the 
speed of the ship, or both at once, to fly the Fish at its optimal 
altitude 24/7 over rugged terrain. The Fish, the long swoop- 
ing cable, the proportionately tiny ship, the improbably distant 
satellite, its beams touching Perth and more distant stations— 
that’s the true array of this plane- catching net, a performance 
that’s never been attempted before and may never be repeated, 
not with this technology. 

Imagine towing a trailer five miles behind your car, survey par- 
ty chief Scott Miller says. In the dark. On mountain roads. As par- 
ty chief. Miller has to stay on top of all the technical problems 
that may arise, as well as the psychological quirks of the survey 
crew. A thirtyish father of three young daughters, with a soul 
patch and a West Australian drawl. Miller boasts talents that in- 
clude absorbing stress and projecting, with wry humor, an easy- 
going confidence. 

Now, with the Fish at depth and the Equator nodding into the 
seas at a joggingpace. Miller and his survey crew commence one 
of the greatest computer games ever played. Electrical impulses 
generated within the Fish are converted to pulses of sound that, 
fanning out from the side-scan transducers, make contact with a 
thousand yards of seabed on either side of the unit and echo back 
as information. A multibeam array on the bottom of the Fish does 
the same. Ailing in the “nadir gap” directly below. 

Almost instantaneously, a detailed profile of the seafloor travels 
to the ship via the flber-optic cable. The surveyors up on the bridge 
view the Fish data in real time, and by comparing the new infor- 
mation with the bathymetric map and current GPS info, they di- 
rect the master to steer the ship— and thus the Fish— in a perfectly 
straight line. In the same way, the tow operators control the up and 
down, the Fish’s altitude. With mountain peaks looming ahead, this 
becomes a game of anticipation. Reel in too fast to make the Fish 
rise and the data is blurred; rise too high above the seabed (nine 
hundred feet is the upper limit) and the data is also compromised. 
Reaching the daily goal of sixty square miles requires maintain- 
ing optimal speed. Flying the Fish around the clock within these 
narrow parameters, on a rough sea, with fatigue increasing with 
every bad night’s sleep, becomes a white-knuckle exercise. 

And, of course, everyone viewing the data is looking for any 
trace of MH370. This may register as a measure of hardness. Any- 
thing metallic is suspicious. Anything angular, any straight line 
sets off alarms. The data is compressed and beamed up to a sat- 
ellite that relays the sonar data files to Fugro’s office in Perth for 
further inspection by expert eyes, and to the Australian Trans- 
port Safety Bureau (ATSB) in Canberra for still more analysis. 


64 ESQUIRE -OCTOBER 2015 


PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREW COWEN 


The data also travels via satellite to a U. S.- 
based quality- control expert, Andrew Sher- 
rell, who advised on the search for Air France 
447. The scrutiny is exhaustive, even obses- 
sive. It’s highly unlikely the Fish will fly over 
the plane, or any piece of it, and all these eyes 
will fail to see it. 

There’s another possibility, though— a so- 
bering one. The search zone is the creation of 
the ATSB, and is perforce somewhat arbitrary. 

Its limits are determined as much by time and 
money as by probability. If Inmarsat and the 
rest, working with so many variables and un- 
knowns, are a little more off than the box al- 
lows, the plane will not be found. 

STORM 

Brad Cooper, a young data processor work- 
ing deep in the belly of the Equator, hails from 
Invercargill, New Zealand, which at a latitude 
of 43 degrees is one of the southernmost cit- 
ies in the world. And though his hometown is 
notorious for its wind and horizontal rain, and 
the local museum features a permanent ex- 
hibit on the Roaring Forties, he says he never 
really gave much thought to what that meant. 

He didn’t plan to become a mariner. Didn’t 
reckon he’d learn about the Roaring Forties 
firsthand, on a ship, staring at a computer 
when you’re going like this and the screen’s 
going like that. If you try to stay fit, you have to 
time your push-ups just right or you get body- 
slammed. Same thing with chin-ups. And most of the time, for- 
get about the treadmill. It’s three hundred steps from the data 
room to the bridge (everyone wears a pedometer, part of a cor- 
porate fitness challenge), where you can watch the seas that’ve 
been knocking you about. Now Brad Cooper knows something 
true about the Roaring Forties. Yes indeed. It’s a zone best avoid- 
ed— not an option for the Fugro ships. They are slow- moving tar- 
gets as they haul the Fish. There’s always tension, the expecta- 
tion of a bad -weather beat- down. 

February 2, 2015. The satellite forecast warned of a perfect shit- 
storm. Tropical Cyclone Diamondra was wallowing to the east, 
about to converge with Tropical Cyclone Eunice, and the Equa- 
tor wsls right in the crosshairs. The ship brought in the Fish and 
secured it on the aft deck, and then the master, Andreas Ryan- 
to Molyo, made a general announcement: “Prepare for a severe 
roll.” The ship executed a hard turn, listing to 35 degrees and then 
righting itself to confront the rising seas. All the tech on board- 
consoles, laptops, phones, etc.— was securely mounted, bolted, 
or glued, personal items lashed or stashed for foul weather. The 
coffee machine was the only casualty, but that was a painful loss. 

At the height of the storm, party chief Scott Miller recalls 
watching from the bridge, where all he could see was a wall of 
white foam five stories high bearing down on the Equator. The 
ship climbed and climbed and punched through, spray firehosing 
the bridge windows. Then it fell into the trough, the prow nearly 
submarining, and began to rise again. The motion, jolting and ar- 
rhythmical, went on and on, as erratically violent as the chaotic 



Project director Paul Kennedy (top) and 
managing director Steve Duffield lead the 
search for MH370 from Fugro's headquarters 
in Perth, on the west coast of Australia. 


seas. Miller notes that Molyo, a deeply experi- 
enced Indonesian mariner, remained stoically 
cool, steering the ship into the waves, which 
were stacked up to the horizon in a grim gray 
file. Except for Miller and the medic, who con- 
tinued making their rounds— and the master, 
of course— the crew members hunkered down 
in their cabins, trying to stay in their bunks. 

There was nowhere to run. To head for 
Perth would mean a six- day retreat followed 
by another six- day chug back, an unacceptable 
loss of time and money. And that wasn’t the 
plan an 5 rway. The plan was to sit it out in the 
survey area, the weather be damned. At such 
times it’s clear that the crew— the wetware— 
is the weak link in the technology, the part 
that suffers. In a storm, the world is reduced 
to the interior of the ship, a maze of stairways 
and gleaming white hallways, all spick-and- 
span, leading up from the twin diesel electric 
engines and the lower-level data-processing 
room, to other empty office rooms with arrays 
of computers and screens, to the unoccupied 
gymnasium and rec room and mess hall. The 
crew is at liberty to pinball off the wall up to 
the high bridge for a view of the seas— which 
established a Fugro record of 57.7 feet during 
that blow— but most stick to their private cab- 
ins, enduring in solitude. 

They hold on, riding out the storm hour 
after sleepless hour. Scott Miller compares 
the experience to a roller-coaster ride that 
can last for days: “You have to learn to live— sleep, eat, drink, 
and go to the bathroom— while on the ride.” John Boudreaux, 
an American AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) tech who 
endured a cyclone on the Supporter, says it’s like “being drunk 
without being drunk.” Boudreaux is a Cajun who loves to eat 
but found holding his plate where he could get at it with his 
fork to be nearly impossible. 

Ever 5 Thing is moving. And everything that can make a noise is 
making the noise it can make. There’s a prank some of the younger 
crew members like to play on trainees. They’ll be coming off the 
ship after their six weeks on and they’ll plant little noise booby 
traps for the next guy in the cabin— maybe little BBs that’ll drib- 
ble from one side of the room to the other once the ship starts 
to roll. One time it was a crumpled Coke can stashed up behind 
the ceiling tiles. But those things get found out in the early days. 
Deeper into the voyage, when the weather turns sour and nerves 
are wearing thin, ordinary sounds become magnified. The pil- 
low stuffing crinkles right in your ear; cabinet doors creak. One 
sleepless night. Miller took a small piece of paper, folded it four 
times to make a shim, and then crammed it into a crack above 
his closet door. Who knows how many sleepless hours, how ma- 
ny other cracks he tried before he found the source of the creak 
and silenced the bugger? 

Eventually every storm blows itself out. The crew members creep 
out of their cabins, chastened, relieved, curious to see what the out- 
side world looks like. And they’ll see something only a handful of 
people have ever seen: fifty-foot waves in the open sea, blue and 


65 


foam-flecked but smooth, glassingoff, still majestic. The cooks put 
out abig feed, and the conversation in the mess rises to a roar. Every- 
body has a story, the same story: Look at us ! We have come through! 

Soon it’s time to start back for the mark, get ready to rede- 
ploy the Fish. Get back to the routine of work. But the bond is 
strengthened between members of the crew and between the 
crew and the larger community it represents. They all feel it. At 
this time, in this place, the Fugro Equator can say to the world, 
to the families of the victims of MH370: We are still here. We 
have not given up. 

MAPS 

In the boardroom of Fugro’s Perth office, the bathymetric map 
sprawls across a very long polished table and hangs over at 
both ends. This map must be thirty feet long and six feet wide. 
It’s a beautiful color-coded artifact depicting the mountains 
and trenches of the deep-sea terrain. An immense miniature, 
it brings home the scope of the search operation. The search 
for anything has a peculiar tautological logic. “If I knew when 
we’d find the plane,” Paul Kennedy says, “I would know where 
to look.” The deep-tow operation has been ongoing for sev- 
en months of twenty-four-hour workdays and could go on for 
another year. Three factors will remain the same: the remote- 
ness of the site, the rigors of the weather, and the isolation of 
the crews. Every moment will be challenging, every new mo- 
ment as important as the last. 

To keep the guys keen, Kennedy and Duffield made a con- 
scious decision from the start to remind them at every turn that 
they are involved in something historic, to give them a bit of the 
rock-star treatment. Something to look forward to when they 
get up in the morning or the middle of the night. These can be 
little things like a bottomless candy bowl. M&M’s, Skittles, Mars 
bars, whatever. Cooks who are ex-cruise-ship chefs and can 
really lay out a spread. For Christmas at sea, they served suck- 
ling pig and carved vegetables. A doctor offering better health 
care than they’d get at home, if only because weekly checkups 
are encouraged on the ship. Thanks to the satellite, they have 
high-speed Internet. 

The crews have responded, both to the humanitarian appeal— 
they keep wanting to go back, which has surprised and touched 
Paul Kennedy— and to the technical challenges. And the system 
is working. The ceaseless river of data streaming from the Fish is 
painstakingly categorized as 3) of no interest; 2) of potential in- 
terest but unlikely to be MH370; and 1) It’s the freaking plane, call 
the ATSB in Canberra! When Category 2’s arise, it’s time to bring 
in the Fugro Supporter, with its AUV. If the Fish is a lawn mower, 
think of the AUV as a Weedwacker, as AUV project manager Nick 
Bardsley puts it. It gets to the tight spots, 
does the close-up work. 

May 13, 2015. The Fish flew over a small 
debris field, twelve nautical miles east of the 
Seventh Arc center line. A classic Catego- 
ry 2. The ATSB’s operational search team 
decided to dispatch the Supporter. Its AUV, 

“Hugin” (named for a Norse god’s compan- 
ion raven), has a sonar array similar to the 
Fish’s, as well as a high- definition camera, 
and can safely nose in to within forty yards 
of a target— twenty if it’s worth the risk. A 


beautiful fifteen-foot orange torpedo, Hugin can be programmed 
for a fully autonomous mission or flown like a radio-operated plane 
via its underwater acoustic modem, sending up data in real time, 
then returning to the surface near the ship, compliant as Flipper. 

On this mission, Hugin shot a series of close-ups of stark clarity, 
like nighttime crime scenes. The straight line that set off the alarm 
bells turned out to be the shaft of an anchor. Multiple bright reflec- 
tions on the tow’s sonar data were identified as rivets and lumps 
of coal. The search team had discovered a previously unchart- 
ed shipwreck, at a depth of 12,800 feet, probably dating from the 
nineteenth century. This was both exciting and a bit of a letdown. 
Indeed, every gap in the tow data— every volcano crater, every 
trench or steep mountainside— will call for a follow-up with the 
AUV. When you look at all the contour lines established by the 
Fish, with an overlay of all the previous AUV missions, the map 
of the survey takes on the complexity of a computer circuit board. 
What used to be one of the least known places on the planet— 
a “blank space,” as Joseph Conrad said of the Congo at the end 
of the nineteenth century— is becoming the most, and the only, 
thoroughly mapped and examined portion of the abyssal zone. 

CLOSING THE LOOP 

When Paul Kennedy talks about his confidence in the satellite da- 
ta, in the calculations derived by Inmarsat and the independent 
brain trust that corroborates them, you feel confident, too. Ye- 
ah, they gotta be right. The wing flap that washed up on Reunion 
Island is further confirmation, in Kennedy’s words, that their 
original analysis was spot- on. The story of the debris has occa- 
sioned new excitement from the world press and the Internet 
blogosphere, a surge of surety that has spread to the Fugro crews, 
whose morale, Kennedy says, is “fantastic.” But all the news sto- 
ries— which begin with the provocative question “Could this be 
the bigbreak?”— conclude that, well, no, not likely. Nor should it 
be ignored that in an overlooked and otherwise-unintelligible- 
to -nonmathematicians paper published by Inmarsat, the writ- 
ers conclude “it is stressed that . . . there remains significant un- 
certainty in the final location.” 

And here’s another possibility, one also not lost on the blogo- 
sphere. When the search for MH370’s black box in the waters 
due west of Australia failed, there was no next move. Yet it was 
impossible to do nothing. Necessity demanded a new strategy, 
and Inmarsat offered one. A guesstimate. Maybe a wild-goose 
chase, but something. One blogging satellite expert said Inmar- 
sat’s published diagrams “look like cartoons.” Maybe the deep- 
sea search is at bottom an elaborate ritual, something between 
mad King Xerxes flogging the sea and a ceremonial covering of 
the grieving body politic with the ashes of information. 

Even if Inmarsat is right and the plane 
lies within the Seventh Arc, chance could 
be the deciding factor. If the aircraft fell 
into a volcano, it may be missed. If the de- 
bris is scattered along a sheer cliff, the Fish 
may not detect it. If it lies at the bottom of a 
trench below sixteen thousand feet, it will 
be out of the AUV’s range. And if the ships 
miss the plane, that’s it— they won’t be go- 
ingback. On the other hand, a Boeing 777 is 
not insubstantial, and the technology em- 
ployed by the ships is impressive. Based 





The search area is fifteen hundred miles 
west of Perth, Australia, and twenty-five hundred 
miles east from where the Boeing 777 wing flap 
washed up on Reunion Island. 


66 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 



on other incidents, the debris field will be about seven hundred 
yards long, impossible to miss unless somehow concealed. The 
ships’ sonar screens should light up like Vegas slots. 

So Kennedy’s confidence in the ships and the crews remains 
unfiappable. He believes that with every square mile searched, 
finding the plane becomes more likely, not less. Expectations 
are actually increasing, not decreasing. Resolve is high on all 
the vessels and in the office. But along with confidence, what 
Kennedy feels mostly is the burden of responsibility. When 
the plane is found, there will be no celebration in the Perth of- 
fice, just relief. 

Already the ATSB is making plans with Malaysia and China 
for the aircraft’s recovery. A large ship will be required for the 
plane itself, with refrigeration for the expected human remains. 
If MH370 struck the sea at a near-level glide, the bodies of the 
dead will have been preserved by the darkness and the extreme 
anaerobic cold, persisting in a gelid state, like waxworks. A heave- 
compensated crane, computer- controlled to negate the roll of 
the ship, will bring the bodies up carefully, in special mesh body 
bags— like tea bags— to best protect them as the pressure decreases 
and the seawater drains. The remains will be returned to their 
families, and the pieces of the plane taken to shore for analysis. 
The hope is that the black box, or the wreckage itself, will tell the 
tale, and the mystery will be solved. 

This is far from a sure thing. In the near year and a half since 
MH370 disappeared, the proposed search zone has had a pro- 
toplasmic life of its own. It swelled to an intimidating three 
million square miles when the Malaysian military radar report 
was first released. Then it contracted to twenty- three thousand 
square miles when faith in the Inmarsat satellite data analysis 
hit its zenith. In April 2015, it doubled to forty-six thousand 
square miles. These numbers are also measures of political will 
and money. Malaysia pledged to match the $65 million Austra- 
lia put aside for the search but has so far not ponied up all of the 
cash. China, home to the vast majority of the passengers, con- 
tinues to sit on the sidelines. Still, these sums, while adding up 


to the most expensive search in aviation history, are less than 
half the cost of a single Boeing 777. By that light, the search has 
been a lowball effort. 

Yet there is growing pressure from the Australian public to 
stop the cash drain. How much will the country pay to know? 
Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, has said that we owe it 
to the twenty- three million Australians who fiy in these planes, 
to the hundreds of millions around the world whose safety is at 
risk. But he has also recently begun to judiciously back away, say- 
ing to Parliament, ‘T can’t promise the search will go on at this 
intensity forever.” A search consortium has quantified the issue 
by stating that without some new information, “there will be no 
further expansion of the search area.” 

Lost!? A 777-200ER? This has been a blow to human pride, to 
human competence. The world looms large again. We are like 
gnats buzzing about in our little tin fiying machines. How much 
would it cost the human spirit— the confidence of the fiying pub- 
lic— to just let it go? 

In the Fugro office in Perth, they know they’re in a race, ap- 
proaching a crossroads. Things could go Greek— Time and Neces- 
sity ruling. Either they’ll call Canberra with the good word or one 
day Canberra will call them and say, “Well, good try, but that’s it.” 

Paul Kennedy feels strongly that this would cost too much. It 
would be unforgivable if we gave up too soon and something like 
this happened again, he says. We need to close the loop. 

If MH370 remains lost, it will become myth. We can’t be having 
that, Kennedy says. There’s nothing natural about aircraft safety. 
It isn’t natural for these great airplanes to stay in the air. It takes 
diligence and hard work. That’s what’s driving this. One morning 
we’ll wake up and there’ll be a phone call from the ships. That’s 
it. Resolution for the families. It’s all about closing the loop for 
them. And closing the loop so it doesn’t happen again. 

After MH370, whether found or lost forever, our net will 
tighten, the loops will contract. Next year, if a recommenda- 
tion becomes law, aircraft will say where they are every fifteen 
minutes instead of every half hour. A movement is afoot for con- 
stant awareness of all locations of all planes in the 
sky. This is necessary, and it will cost. This is the 
dream of Indra’s Net, everything refiecting ev- 
er 5 l;hing, ever 5 l;hing in touch. The technology al- 
ready exists, for a price. There’s also a movement 
to limit passenger or pilot malfeasance by expand- 
ing the autonomy of the machines. Here one loop 
tightens and another expands. The onus shifts to 
the technicians and maintenance crews to nev- 
er make a mistake. The cloud of data grows in re- 
al time, always threatening to spiral out of con- 
trol. Like the Indian Ocean Gyre. Like the Roaring 
Forties. Like life. 

Let us pray. Open your books to any page. Yes, 
that greasy, dog-eared document in the seat fiap 
in front of you. Admire that infinity pool above 
the Mediterranean blue. Consider yurt-to-yurt 
trekking in Mongolia. Take a moment to circle the 
names of the gods diagonally on the puzzle page, 
on the way to regarding the hubs, those many- 
fingered rosettes of pure possibility. 

Use all your devices with all appropriate apps. 
Say you are here. You want to go there. Go there, 



67 



Caviar, Monica Bellucci, February 2001; python, Rachel Weisz, April 2004; Stephen King 
novella. Bar Refaeli, July 2009; tobacco leaves, Rihanna, November 2011. 


Caulfield, Holden 

His fate— after the events of The Catch- 
er in the Rye— was revealed by J D. Salin- 
ger in a short story published in Esquire 
in October 1945, six years before the re- 
lease of Catcher. Although Holden made 
a passing appearance in a story Salinger 
wrote for The Saturday Evening Post the 
previous year, he turned up as a significant 
character for the first time in a published 
story in '‘This Sandwich Has No Mayon- 
naise,’' which focuses on Army sergeant 
Vincent Caulfield, sitting on a troop truck 
in the rain in Georgia awaiting travel to 
an off-base dance as he worries about his 
younger brother: 

Where’s my brother? Where’s my broth- 
er Holden? What is this missing-in-ac- 
tion stuff? I don’t believe it. I don’t un- 
derstand it. I don’t believe it. The United 
States Government is a liar. The Govern- 
ment is lying to me and my family. . . . 

Missing, missing, missing. Lies! I’m be- 
ing lied to. He’s never been missing be- 
fore. He’s one of the least missing boys 
in the world. He’s here in this truck; he’s 
home in New York; he’s at Pentey Pre- 
paratory School (“You send us the Boy. 
We’ll mold the Man— All modern fire- 
proof buildings . . .”); yes, he’s at Pentey, 
he never left school; and he’s at Cape Cod, 
sitting on the porch, biting his fingernails; 
and he’s playing doubles with me, yelling 
at me to stay back at the baseline when 
he’s at the net. Missing! Is that missing? 
Why lie about something as important 
as that? 

Salinger, then a twenty -six-year-old Army 
sergeant— and D-day veteran and friend of 
Hemingway’s in Paris— was still stationed 
overseas when he wrote the story, his sec- 
ond for Esquire. 


DUBIOUS 


ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS 


1976 

▼ 

DEAR MR. PYNCHON: AS YOU 
KNOW, rVE BEEN ASKED TO 
TIE UP A FEW LOOSE ENDS IN 
YOUR ADORABLE NEW BOOK. 
(MY, irS A FAT MASTERPIECE!) 
AS YOU CAN SEE, I’VE MADE A 
FEW TEENSY PENCIL MARKS, 
ONE ON PAGE SIX, THE 
OTHER ON PAGE SEVEN. THE 
REST LOOKS SUBLIME... 
Jacqueline Onassis was hired as an 
editor by Viking Press. 


68 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


BELLUCCI: FABRIZIO FERRI; WEISZ, REFAELI: JAMES WHITE; RIHANNA: RUSSELL JAMES 







Chicago 



1. Esquire’s home until 1950, and where 
a young Hugh Hefner worked in the pro- 
motions office before decamping to start 
his own magazine, Playboy. 

2. Hometown of Jeanne Dean, a fifteen- 
year-old usher at the Studio Theatre who 
became Alberto Vargas’s muse. 

3. Where William Burroughs, John Sack, 
Terry Southern, and Jean Genet got their 
asses kicked by the police while cover- 


ing the 1968 Democratic convention 
for Esquire (“Grooving in Chi,” Novem- 
ber 1968). 

4. Also a good place to have a drink, es- 
pecially an afternoon manhattan at the 
Green Mill, on North Broadway, a beat- 
up but elaborate old speakeasy that Ca- 
pone used to frequent. 

Clinton, Bill 

See THE MEN OF OUR TIME. 


DUBIOUS 


ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS 

2001 

▼ 

ON SECOND THOUGHT, RAISE 
YOUR LEFT HAND 

Anonymous sperm donors can be 
forced to testify in legal proceedings, 
the California supreme court ruled. 


CLINTON, fflLLARY 

WHEN THE HYSTERIA SETTLES,” WE WROTE IN 1993, SHE MAY 
LEAVE “THIS COUNTRY IRREVOCABLY CHANGED . . 



@© 

Shazam this photograph to read perhaps the most startlingly unorthodox 
assessment of Hillary Clinton ever written. 


^^Hillary. Happy/' by Tom Junod, May 2010: 

She was always in the process of becoming. There 
was always the sense that she became one thing 
on the condition that she could become another: 
that she became First Lady on the condition that 
she could become senator, and that she became 
senator on the condition that she could become 


She did not warrant one of the forty-five in-depth 
profiles that accompanied the list (nor did he). That 
would change. 


"You'll Never Look at Hillary Clinton the Same Way 
Again," by Tom Junod, October 1999: 

She has a sexy mouth, I think. That slight palatal 
overbite— it gets to me. She seems expert at mar- 
shaling her mouth’s resources, at inspiring its inge- 
nuity. She can fold her lips into an origami of fleet- 
ing smiles. Her basic smile is sort of chipmunky and 
schoolmarmish, but sometimes, when she is pounc- 
ing on the possibility of an idea, her lips extend their 
reach into her cheeks and carve out a wolfish, car- 
nal line, as though nothing could please her more 
than her own hunger. . . . 

The tragedy of the Clintons’ marital “arrange- 
ment” is that it doomed them both to their own kinds 
of humiliation— hers sexual, his political— and yet 
because her humiliation forced her to seek a new be- 
ginning even as his spoke to him of his end, Hillary 
Clinton will wind up being more meaningful than 
Bill Clinton ever was. The President of the United 
States of America? He will become nothing more 
and nothing less than Hillary’s escort. 


AMONG THE 272 MEN AND WOMEN under forty celebrated 
in the first ''Esquire Register: The Best of a New Generation,’’ pub- 
lished in December 1984, the editors said, "We do not claim to have 
a future President here.” They were right in every case but one (Bill 
Clinton, then thirty -eight) and possibly two: Hillary Rodham Clin- 
ton, then thirty-seven. 


president. There was always another layer to which she could 
aspire, and the aspiration, as much as the accomplishment, is 
what gave her meaning. More than any other figure of her gen- 
eration, her public ambitions were tied to her self-actualiza- 
tion, and her quest for self-actualization is what turned out to 
be public property. 


70 ESQUIRE -OCTOBER 2015 


PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY HUBERT KRETZSCHMAR 



PROGRESS: DMIVEN BY A WILL 
OF STEEL TO WIN, BiM NEVER FINISH. 


JIMMIE JOHNSON 


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Cocktails 

A POST-PROHIBITION 
HISTORY OF DRINKING IN 
AMERICA. AND ESQUIRE. 



WHEN ESQUIRE made its debut in late 
1933, repeal was imminent and Americans 
didn’t know a damn thing about polite drink- 
ing. Fourteen years of adulterate alcohol and 
literally criminal bartenders had turned us 
into a nation of indiscriminate liquor swill- 
ers, people who thought the right wine for 
filet of sole was gin and orange juice. It was 
an integral part of the magazine’s mission to 
fix this. To this end, it deployed a crack corps 
of mixographers, including the bohemian 
bookseller- anthologist Frank Shay; Jimmie 
Charters, who had been Hemingway’s bar- 
tender in Paris; Murdock Pemberton, one of 
the founders of the famed Algonquin Round 
Table; and the copper-throated, granite-liv- 
ered Lawton Mackall. Throughout the 1930s, 
they wrangled with underaged whiskey, un- 
familiar imports, crappy. Prohibition- expe- 
dient cocktails that had outlived their time, 
and a vast pool of ignorance. 

They also paid attention to what people 
were actually drinking and advocated for the 
best of it— whether that meant the pre-Prohibition classics, trop- 
ical drinks drawing American tourists in droves to the Floridi- 
ta in Havana, or something as simple as the then- exotic gin and 
tonic. Novelties such as vodka (then newly imported and pop- 
ular in certain Manhattan nightspots), pisco, and tequila found 
their place in the long and detailed monthly “Potables” column, 
but so did good old rye and Scotch and Holland gin. 

Then came the war, which “Potables” spent trying to keep the 
drinking man’s morale up in the face of rationing and severe short- 
ages of just about everything but cheap Caribbean rum and iffy 
domestic vermouth (see sidebar). 

When the war was over, it seemed like the drinking man didn’t 
much care what he drank as long as it was straightforward and 
anesthetically strong, and soon Esquire didn’t, either. Only in the 
late 1990s did things begin to turn back to the way they were in 
the magazine’s early years. 

The cover of the April 1997 issue of Esquire featured abrunette 
in a black cocktail dress perched, rather awkwardly, on the rim 
of a giant martini glass. “Welcome to Cocktail Culture” read the 


®Q 

zam this picture to see an Esquire cocktail guide from 1948. 

headline. Americans were starting to drink real cocktails again. 
At the end of 1998, Esquire had a regular drinks column for the 
first time in decades. 

By 2004, when I took over, it was back to the old “Potables” 
days. People gave a damn about the spirits they were drinking 
and thought it a useful thing to know how to turn them into el- 
egant, balanced cocktails, punches, sours, fizzes, and what have 
you. We’ve been trying to give the people what they want ever 
since, ignoring the faddish edges and geeky swamplands that al- 
ways surround such things and sticking to drinks that you can ac- 
tually make, and might actually want to. Some of our obsessions 
have become some of yours: rye whiskey, which we’ve been talk- 
ing up for fifteen years, finally caught on (between 2009 and now, 
rye grew from selling 88,000 cases a year to well over half a mil- 
lion); mezcal, which we first wrote about in 2005, is white-hot; and 
suddenly everybody’s drinking our favorite cocktail, the old-fash- 
ioned. Even the big bowl of punch, an Esquire entertaining favor- 
ite since the days of Pemberton and Mackall, is back. What’s next? 
We figure you’ll tell us, like you always have. — d avid wondrich 


Cocktail, 
the Esquire 


During World War II, 
there were shortages of 
everything but rum and 
tequila, and Esquire col- 
umnist Lawton Mack- 
all wrote lots of columns 


on how to deal with 
them responsibly. The 
Esquire Cocktail is him 
doing his part. Contem- 
plate its symbolism. Do 
not drink it. 


The Esquire 
Cocktail 

(May 1942) 


> 3 parts dry vermouth 

> 1 part gin 


> Stir with cracked ice 
in mixing glass. Strain 
into cocktail glass. As 
final zest note, wring 
a piece of lemon peel 
over drink. 


72 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


PHOTOGRAPH BY NIGEL COX 



PROMOTION 


A LEGACY 
IN EVERY BOTTLE 


► 

► 

► 

► 

► 


ONE FAMILY’S 
REMARKABLE STORY 


IT STARTS IN SCHIEDAM 

Joannes Nolet finds his ideal 
distillery location, in Schiedam, 
near Rotterdam, Holland. 


COMING TO AMERICA 

The family decides to put down roots 
in America and in 1902, the eighth 
generation, Joannes Nolet, opens a 
distillery in Baltimore, Maryland. 


PROHIBITION 

A milestone in American cocktail 
culture, the Volstead Act brings in 
Prohibition, just l8 years after his 
bold move, Joannes is forced to 
close the distillery. 


KETEL ONE VODKA IS BORN 

Drawing on their family's tasting 
notes, loth generation Carolus 
Nolet, creates the perfect recipe. 

It's named after the oldest, coal-fired 
copper pot still used at the distillery 
today— Distil leerketel #1. 


n A'i r LEGACY OF EXCELLENCE 

I Q Ketel One is voted the “Best Selling 
Vodka” and “Most Trending Vodka” 
of 2015 in the latest “The World's 
50 Best Bars Brand Report,” by 
Drinks International. 



1920 




A family business with 325 years of 
dedication to the highest standards of 
craftsmanship calls for celebration. 

Next year the Nolet Distillery in Schiedam, 
Holland, the home of Ketel One Vodka, 
celebrates 325 years of family passion and 
distilling expertise. 

That legacy continues today, with each 
batch of Ketel One Vodka being tasted 
and approved by a member of the Nolet 
family before bottling. We think that's 
worth raising a glass. 

And since the first case of Ketel One 
arrived in the United States in 1983, the 
family has valued the vital role bartenders 
play in bringing the unparalleled quality 
of Ketel One to discerning drinkers. 

Celebrate with us as three of the 
country's most respected mixologists 
spotlight your favorite classic cocktails 
crafted with Ketel One Vodka. 



tdOne' 


voDigv 



KETEL ONE Vodka. Distilled from Wheat. 40% >lc/Vol. ©2015 Imported by 
Ketel One USA, Aliso Viejo, CA. 






"I love that you can get a Bloody Mary in any bar in 
the world, but because there are so many different 
variations on tomato juice and vodka, you really 
never know what you’re going to get. The sky’s 
still the limit.” — jeff bell, bartender, nyc 


4 oz. Tomato Juice 
1.5 oz. Ketel One® Vodka 
.25 oz. Lemon Juice 
.25 oz. Lime Juice 
.25 oz. Worcestershire Sauce 
.5 tsp. Horseradish 
.5 tsp. Bloody Mary Spice Blend 
.25 tsp. Hot Sauce 


Build in a mixing glass then fill with ice. Roll then 
fine strain into a chilled Collins glass filled with 
ice. Garnish with a celery stalk. 


TIP 

“Always stir 
your Martini — 
the texture 
will be better 
than if you 
shake it. 
Save a pair 
of chopsticks 
fronn your 
takeout and 


The 


use one to 
stir your 
honnennade 
version — it'l I 
give the sanne 
sensation as 
a bar spoon.” 


“If you have 1 
have anofher, 
ice cold drini 
When you ma 
right way — f 

— PAMELA WIZNI 


1.5 OZ. Ketel 


Stir with ice 
rocks glass c 
glass. Garni' 


Can be tailo 
addition of c 
or 0.25 oz. d 
decrease Ke 






mailini 


PROMOTION 


Ketel OneTalksTo Bartenders About Their 

PASSIONS FOR 
THE CLASSICS 


One® Vod ka 


in a mixing glass and strain into a 
)ver one large ice cube, or a martini 
;h with a lemon twist. 

red to personal taste with the 
)live brine, specialty olives and/ 
ry vermouth (if adding vermouth, 
tel One Vodka by O.25 oz.). 


one Vodka Martini, you’re bound to 
because it’s an appeaiing, crystai ciear, 

[ equaiiy at borne with fruit or oiives. 
ke it your way at home, it’s aiways the 
t has a go-to flavor that everyone loves.” 

ITZER, BARTENDER, NYC 


TIP 

“If you're 
serving a 
crowd, nnake 
your nnix a 
day ahead 
and let it sit 
overnight. 
Add a flavor 
variation 
with nnuddled 
cucunnber or 
strawberries.” 


“I thinkThe Mule is important not only 
due to its vibrant bistory and role in 
helping to bring vodka into tbe spotlight, 
but also because of the influence it has 
had in our current cocktail renaissance.” 

— CHARLES JOLY, BARTENDER, CHICAGO 


The Ketel One Dutch Mule 

1.5 oz. Ketel One® Vodka 
0.75 oz. fresh lime juice 
ginger beer 

Build in a copper mug or highball 
glass over ice. Top with ginger beer. 
Stir. Garnish with a lime wedge. 


The IHuk 




PROMOTION 




Vour« Invikd 


Our family distillery is celebrating its 
325 ^*^ anniversary 

We'd love for you to visit us at 
Hoofdstraat 14 , Schiedam, Holland 

For details on how to schedule a tour 
or for a chance to win a trip to the 
anniversary celebration, visit us at ketelone.com 
or tweet us (a)KetelOne ^ketelonedistilleryvisit 


Carolus Nolet, Generation 



KETEL0NE®V0DKADISTILLERYTRIP CONTEST Please Drink Responsibly. 

NO PURCHASE NECESSARYTO ENTER, A PURCHASE WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING, OPEN TO LEGAL RESIDENTS OFTHE UNITED KETEL ONE Vodka, Distilled from Wheat,40% Alc/Vol,©2015 Imported by 

STATES WHD ARE 21 YEARS OF AGE OR OLDER, VOID WHERE PRDHIBITED DR RESTRICTED BY LAW, Contest begins at 12:01 a,m, ET on October 1, 2015, Ketei One USA, Aiiso Viejo, CA, 

and ends at 1 1 ;59;59 p,m, ET on March 31 , 201 6, subject to weekiy entry deadlines. For officiai ruies, how to enter, prize descriptions and weekiy entry 
deadiines,go to http;//tinyuri,com/keteionestory. 


Sponsor: Diageo Americas, Inc,, Norwalk, CT, 


ILLUSTRATION BY JOE McKENDRY; PHOTO: EPG/HULTON A R C H I V E / G E T T Y 



Clitoris 

As celebrated in comedian Wanda Sykes’s 
prose poem “10 Things You Don’t Know 
About Women,” published in the Septem- 
ber 2003 issue: 

1. The quickest way to a woman’s heart is 
through her clit. 

2. When we say we want you to get in touch 
with your feminine side, we really mean 
you need to touch our clit. 

3. When we ask you if we look fat, it real- 
ly means “Can you see my clit?” 

4. We’d love to meet your mom. Right af- 
ter we introduce you to our clit. 

5. Diamonds are forever, but touching our 
clit can buy you two or three years. 

6 . When we tell you, “We’re not commu- 
nicating,” it really means you’re not touch- 
ing our clit. 

7. We’d be happy to buy our own damn 
drinks if you touched our clit. 

8. When we say, “Harder! Harder!” that 
means “Take it out and touch my clit.” 

9. The fact that women make seventy-five 
cents to every man’s dollar won’t bother 
us as long as you touch our clit. 

10. “Go have boys’ night out” really means 
“I’ll stay home and touch my clit.” 


Cramer, Richard Ben 

See SPORTS. 


D 



>The thing I learned the most from my father is Don’t wait for tomorrow. Don’t say 
you’re gonna do something “when the kids grow up.” Don’t say, “I’m going to go to 
Israel once you guys are out of school.” Because he got pancreatic cancer at fifty- 
two, and he never did any of it. The gift he gave me was a residue of his death. Don’t 
ever wait to satisfy an idea or a hope or a dream. — Mandy Patinkin, January 2013 
>That’s one of the things the illness has given me: It’s a degree of death. There’s a cer- 
tain amount of loss, and whenever you have a loss, it’s a step toward death. So if you 
can accept loss, you can accept the fact that there’s gonna be the bigloss. Once you can 
accept that, you can accept anything. So then I think, “Well, given that that’s the case, 
let’s tip myself abreak. Let’s tip everybody a break.” —Michael J. Fox, January 2008 
►Maybe when you die, you come before a big, bearded man on a big throne, and 
you say, “Is this heaven?” And he says, “Heaven? You just came from there.” 
—Kirk Douglas, April 2001 

►It’s frustrating when someone asks, “How are you coming? Are you over it?” I will 
never, ever be over it. Not in a million years. But it will become something I under- 
stand more. It’s that understanding that makes you feel like when you let go, you’re 
not being disloyal to the person who died. —Allison Janney, January 2012 
►My son once asked me, “What happens when we die?” I said, “Nobody really knows. 
Some people think that the spirit”— and he stopped me. “What’s a spirit?” “Well, it’s 
a part of you that doesn’t change and people think that some part of it lives on.” He 
said, “Here’s what I think. I think we go into the ocean, we wash up on a desert is- 
land, and Georgia O’Keeffe finds our bones and then she paints them.” And I said, 
“I’m going with your version.” — Mary-Louise Parker, January 2011 



Dickinson, Angie 


In March 1966, Esquire ran a 
one-page photo of actress 
Angie Dickinson wearing noth- 
ing but a baby-blue sweater and 
a pair of white pumps. It wasn't 
until twenty-seven years later 
that Dickinson made the cov- 
er as the star of our "Sixty Years 
of Women We Love" issue. The 
iconic image was re-created for 
the cover by Britney Spears in 
2003 and again by four Victo- 
ria's Secret Angels in 2008. 


When you first published this 
photo way back in 1966 I was 
so honored just to be in your 
magazine. Now, all this time 
later, with three separate cov- 
ers inspired by that origi- 
nal shot, I can only say that's 
it's . . . better than popcorn! 

I was thrilled to death when 
Britney Spears appeared on 
the cover in 2003, because 
she was just one of the hot- 
test women around. That was 
a real boost. But at the time, it 
was just another photo shoot. 


It wasn't like a studio shoot, 
where they have a photogra- 
pher and a set department and 
a wardrobe department that 
picks out clothes for you. This 
was "Well, what should we 
do? I didn't bring any clothes!" 
It felt naughty but nice. The 
only thing is, I would not have 
used that caption ["The Happi- 
ness of Angie Dickinson"], be- 
cause happy was not exact- 
ly what I was looking for. Sultry 
was more my bag. 

—AS TOLD TO JULIA BLACK 


@b 


Shazam the cover above to see the original photo of Angie Dickinson as it ran in 1966. 


77 






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"banana republic 



ICONS BY CHRIS PHILPOT 


Dress Codes 

“Esquire aims to be, among other things, a fashion guide for men. But it never 
intends to become ... a primer for fops.” So wrote the founding editor in issue 
one, and over 999 subsequent issues, Esquire has guided readers toward stylish, 
mostly sensible clothing options for whatever life throws their way. Such as . . . 



ORA 

BIG 

MEETING 


Silhouettes have tightened 
and relaxed. Double-breasted 
has gone in and out of style. 
Through it all, even in the 
most casual-leaning times, 
the two-piece suit has re- 
mained the lingua franca of 
the serious workplace. 



1935 



NOW 


A more recent 
history of Esquire- 
sanctioned attire 



NOW 


6 

FORA 

COCKTAIL 

PARTY 

What's changed: the extent 
to which we dress way the 
hell up (tie and all) for the 
sake of a little revelry. What's 
the same: a strategic use 
of color and accessories to 
draw in the eye and express 
some personality. 



1942 



1961 



NOW 



FORA 
BLACK- 
TIE EVENT 

Before World War II, white tie 
and tails was the formal stan- 
dard and a black-tie tuxedo 
was considered semiformal. 

By 1950 or so, black tie be- 
came the gold standard, and 
endless variations in cut, color, 
and proportions followed. 



1934 



1956 



NOW 




1 v: * 


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"Esquire" 

In November 1932, publisher David Smart 
and editor Arnold Gingrich conceived of 
a men’s-interest magazine aiming to be- 
come “the common denominator of mas- 
culine interests” and a “magazine for men 
only.” They rejected the names “Stag,” 
“Beau,” and “Trim” in favor of “Esquire” 
after Gingrich received a letter addressed 
to “Arnold Gingrich, Esq.” 

Whew. 

Below, design director David Curcurito 
explains the evolution of Esquire’s dis- 
tinctive logo. 

1933 

"The first logo feels very personal, almost like 
Esky carved his name into a tree." 


iAX\}JiVlC 

1945 

"The thicker version was designed to stand 
out on the newsstand. Which was probably 
also the thinking behind the cover drawings 
of seminude women." 


1956 

"This logo is short without being dumpy, just 
like Elizabeth Taylor. And even though 
It's harder to read, it's still in keeping with the 
spirit of the original script." 


1980 

"The only version to feature a curled q, 
which Is very cute. You know, for a men's- 
magazine logo. It didn't last long." 


£A€^iijbi£. 

1993 

"The current logo doesn't have a single 
straight line. It's recognizable as Esquire even 
when it's been covered six 
times by George Clooney's giant head." 



HOW THE CELEBRITIES HAVE TALKED ABOUT CELEBRITY- 
ITS RAW THRILL, ITS ULTIMATE PITFALLS 


>"Joe," said Marilyn 
Monroe, just back from 
Korea, "you never heard 
such cheering." "Yes 
I have," Joe DiMaggio 
answered. 

— ^The Silent Season of 
a Hero/' by Gay Talese, 
July 1966 

> If everybody tells you 
that you are accom- 
plished but you don't feel 
accomplished, then what 
the fuck good is that? If 
people tell you that you 
are a great lover but you 
don't feel like a great lov- 
er, then what is that? 

They make that up about 
you, but it has nothing 

to do with you, and so it 
strengthens the opinion 
that you have of yourself. 
—Paul Newman, as 
quoted In "The Fur- 
ther Adventures of Paul 
Newman/' by Robert 
Scheer, October 1989 

> They want the stardom to 
rub off on them in bed. You 
know: If you fuck it, you be- 
come it. Sorry. That's the 
most pathetic illusion of all. 
—Debra Winger, as 
quoted in "Confessions 
of a Reluctant Sex 
Goddess," by Tom 
Robbins, February 1993 

> When I left the Navy, I 
used the Gl Bill to get in- 
to the Dramatic Work- 
shop, which was located 
at the President Theatre 
on Forty-eighth Street. 
Walter Matthau and 
Harry Belafonte were 
students there, too. We 
were all just trying to 
make it. Later on, I went 
out to California, and 
good things started hap- 
pening for me. When I 
came back to New York 


to do a promotion for 
City Across the River, 
they gave me a suite at 
the Sherry-Netherland 
and a huge black lime. I 
took it around to show my 
buddies in the Bronx and 
then went by the Dramat- 
ic Workshop. It was a ter- 
rible, rainy afternoon, and 
who do I see out in front? 
Walter Matthau. He's got a 
long, heavy coat on with a 
Racing Form sticking out 
of the pocket, and he's 
looking down at the gut- 
ter. . . . The look on his face 
says, "What's ever going 
to happen for me? Noth- 
in'!" So I tell the driver to 
pull alongside him and 
stop. Now Walter's watch- 
ing the lime. I roll the win- 
dow down, look at him, 
and say, "I fucked Yvonne 
De Carlo!" Then I roll the 
window back up in a 
hurry and tell the driver to 
get the hell out of there. 
—"What I've Learned: 
Tony Curtis," by Cal 
Fussman, January 2006 

> If it weren't for "Dick in 
a Box," there's every pos- 
sibility that Timberlake 
wouldn't be standing in 
this hotel room dressed 
like Ernie, beside some 
guy dressed like Bert, 
about to walk through 
the crowded exhibits 
at Comic-Con, one of 
the very few men in the 
world who somehow be- 
comes less conspicuous 
when he pulls on a giant 
orange head. ... "I keep 
forgetting, when peo- 
ple ask to take our pic- 
ture," he says as we final- 
ly reach the doors of the 
Convention Center. "It's 
because I'm Ernie. It's not 
because I'm me." 

—"Go Ahead, Set Him 


on Fire," by Chris Jones, 
October 2011 

>Clooneyand DiCaprio 
once ran into each oth- 
er in Cabo and struck up 
a conversation based on 
their common interest in 

basketball Clooney 

suggested they might 
play someday. DiCaprio 
said sure, but felt com- 
pelled to add, "You know, 
we're pretty serious." 

They played at a 
neighborhood court. 

"You know, I can play," 
Clooney says in his living 
room. "I'm not great, by 
any means . . . but I know I 
can play. I also know that 
you don't talk shit un- 
less you can play. And 
the thing about playing 
Leo is you have all these 
guys talking shit.... And 
so then we're watch- 
ing them warm up, and 
they're doing this weave 
around the court, and 
one of the guys I play 
with says, 'You know 
we're going to kill these 
guys, right?' Because 
they can't play at all. 
We're all like fifty years 
old, and we beat them 
three straight: 11-0, 

11-0, 11-0. And the dis- 
crepancy between their 
game and how they talk- 
ed about their game 
made me think of how 
important it is to have 
someone in your life to 
tell you what's what. 

I'm not sure if Leo has 
someone like that." 
—"George Clooney's 
Rules for Living," 
byTom Junod, 
December 2013 


TURN THE PAGE TO READ 
A REVEALING PORTRAIT OF 
A VERY FAMOUS MAN. 


A 


ZUCKERBERG 


KIND 


THE FAMOUS AND THE POWERFUL 
HAVE NEW, MORE EFFECTIVE 
MEANS OF WALLING THEMSELVES 
OFF FROM US. WHERE, SAY, 

SINATRA HAD GOONS, TODAY'S 
TITANS HIDE BEHIND 
TRANSPARENCY AND FULL 
DISCLOSURE. 

AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT BY TOM JUNOD 


OF 

LOVE 


forget what I wore for my first encounter with 

I Mark Zuckerberg. I know it wasn’t a suit— that would 

have seemed out of place in the rigorously casual 
world of Facebook. I probably wore what I usually 
wear, a pair of jeans and a Gap T-shirt, maybe my black sneakers. 

Of course, I don’t even have to try to remember what Zuck wore, 
and my certainty in this regard serves as a case in point— or, as 
he likes to say, “data.” It works. That whole gray-T-shirt thing of 
his— it works. Not only does he not have to think about what he’s 
going to wear when he wakes up in the morning, I don’t have to 
think about what he wore on the days I spent in his company. I 
have to try to think about what I wore. And I can’t think about 
what I wore without thinking about how he answered the all- 
too -predictable question about what he wore. 

“I’m in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every 
day and help serve more than a billion people,” he said. “I feel like 
I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that 
are silly or frivolous about my life, so that way I can dedicate all of 
my energy toward just building the best products and services . . . 
and achieve this mission of helping to connect everyone in the 
world and giving them the ability to stay connected with the peo- 
ple they love and care about.” Perhaps unnecessarily, he added 
that Steve Jobs took the same approach to his wardrobe, and that 
“President Obama, I don’t think, chooses what he wears every 
day, for the same psychological reason.” 

Christ. He’s good. He’s very good. Because, you see, the an- 
swer sounded pretty straightforward. He’s an important guy. He’s 


doing important things. He runs one of the most important com- 
panies in the world. He wasn’t tryingto compare himself to Jobs 
and the president, and even if he was, well, he’s helping to connect 
everyone in the world and giving them the ability to stay connected 
with the people they love and care about. And I really don’t think 
he was trying to make me feel bad about myself and what I wore. 
He was just saying what works for him, what he’s figured out. 

Still . . . were the clothes that I was wearing really so silly and 
frivolous? Was I so silly and frivolous? It seemed, for the first 
time but not for the last, that Zuck was trying to tell me some- 
thing, even to teach me something, about how to live. He’d created 
Facebook at nineteen and made his first billion at twenty- three. 
Now thirty-one, he is free to live as he chooses, and he chooses to 
live in an endless succession of identical gray T-shirts, the sack- 
cloth and ashes of the digital age. He used to use his wardrobe to 
advertise his youth and disregard for convention. Now he uses 
it to communicate his purity of intention— clothes that can be 
worn by anyone gradually turning into clothes only he can wear. 


any years ago, when Mark Zuckerberg still had 
the callowness of youth, he notoriously printed 
“I’m CEO... bitch” on his business cards. He 
doesn’t do that kind of thing anymore, because he 
doesn’t have to. He’s still CEO, and now here he is, talking about 
the new headquarters that his company has just inhabited in 
Menlo Park, California. He’s going on about how industrial the 
buildings are, how work- oriented, with huge swaths of open space 


84 ESQUIRE -OCTOBER 2015 


PHOTOGRAPH BY BEN GOLDSTEIN 



and a desk for each of the twenty- eight hundred employees who 
toil at headquarters. “The building itself is pretty simple and isn’t 
fancy,” he says both flatly and enthusiastically, a combination 
he has made his own. 

His modesty is, like everything else having to do with Zucker- 
berg, Zuckerbergian. He makes it sound as though he relocated 
Facebook to a Maoist labor camp. In truth, the headquarters 
were designed by Frank Gehry. They are phantasmagorically 
fancy, and the difference between their splendor and his de- 
scription of them only underscores the difference between him 
and everybody else. This seems not a matter of intention or even 
of habit but rather of the insularity that is part and parcel of 
being the most well-connected person in the world. 

He is known for not caring very 
much about money and for living in 
Palo Alto in the closest approximation 
of a middle-class lifestyle that $33 bil- 
lion can buy; he is also known for hav- 
ing bought all the houses surrounding 
his own, as well as part of a Hawai- 
ian island. Even so, he tries to connect 
with people, as an avocation and as a 
demonstration of principle. He de- 
clares himself on the side of openness 
and transparency, and evinces almost 
paternal pride over the part Facebook 
has played in making the world a more 
open and transparent place. It is all 
the more disconcerting, then, when he 
expresses such profound admiration 
for world leaders who speak through 
Facebook in order to avoid answering 
difficult questions. 

“I just went on this trip through a few 
countries in Asia, to India and Indonesia 
in the beginning, for work on this proj- 
ect Internet.org to help spread Inter- 
net access and connectivity,” he says on a rainy afternoon in Cali- 
fornia, his shirtsleeves identifying him as a man impervious to the 
elements. “One of the things that was really interesting to me in 
both India and Indonesia is that both countries had elections I think 
in the last year, and in both of those countries social media played 
an important role or was an important tool that Prime Minister 
Modi and President Joko Widodo used in Indonesia in order to 
connect with people in their country. And when I asked those lead- 
ers about it, what they told me was they want a channel to speak 
directly with the people they serve. They don’t want to have to 
go through someone else who might twist the message. . . . Using 
social media, Facebook, and all the other products in order to get 
that message out directly, I think, is very powerful in a way that 
can’t be twisted by intermediaries.” 

He allows himself a faint smile. He is not subtle or sly; indeed, 
a friend of his told me that he has “no capacity for guile whatso- 
ever.” But he is also a man forced by circumstance to flgure out 
how to act when putting down his trump card, and that’s what 
he is doing right now. He’s speaking not just about Internet.org, 
which he founded to provide basic digital services to underdevel- 
oped parts of the world, but also about his decision to start talking 
directly to what he calls “the Facebook community,” in a series 


of town-hall- style question-and-answer sessions. Once again, I 
don’t think he meant to pull rank, or to remind me of the dispar- 
ities that exist between us. But I found myself feeling the same 
way I felt when he characterized the choices that people like me 
have to make in regard to their wardrobe as “silly or frivolous.” 
I felt again that he was trying to deliver some kind of important 
life lesson, in this case the simple fact that a man with the power 
to talk to everybody doesn’t have to talk to you. 

t is the last question. It is also the end of the day, 

I and he looks tired, with travel looming ahead of him. 

He is still not used to traveling. For a long time, he 
says, he didn’t travel that often, and he still pre- 
fers to spend his time at Facebook. But 
Internet.org has changed all that, as well 
as the town halls. Now he stands in front 
of a packed house in a Barcelona event 
space in his customary monastic garb 
and waits for his moderator to hand the 
microphone to a young woman in a boxy 
navy-blue sweater. 

He still looks young and perhaps 
always will. But his appearance has 
changed in subtle ways since the days 
when he was an engineer among engi- 
neers, coding Facebook into necessity 
and perhaps into permanence. There 
is something almost Roman about him 
now, with his freckles replaced by a 
vaguely golden hue, the lift gone out of 
his hair and his curls flattened against 
his scalp like swirls cut into a statue, his 
chin tilting back in response to ques- 
tions and his long, flne nose angling 
toward the ceiling, his slightly petulant 
lower lip, and the implacable excellence 
of his posture. Only his hooded eyes 
reveal his want of sleep, and only his occasional blushes and sweat- 
ing reveal that he might possess anything less than total confi- 
dence before a crowd. He stays in shape— he says he tries to work 
out at least three times a week— and it somehow wouldn’t be 
surprising if instead of answering the question he dropped his 
microphone and flexed. 

The woman, however, does not ask a question but rather makes 
a request that her small, halting, and heavily accented voice fash- 
ions into a plea. “This is going to be a historical moment in my life,” 
she says. “And I would like to ask you a favor— if we could take a 
picture to add to my Facebook wall. Please? Can we?” 

He pauses before he answers. “Awwww, this is so sad,” he Anally 
says, as though he’s just witnessed a cute pet video. “If I do that, 
I’m going to miss my flight. Because I can’t just take a photo with 
you— that’s not fair. I’d end up taking a photo with everyone here. 
And actually, I’m taking off right after this. So here’s what you 
can do. There’s going to be a video that is going to have us— me, 
answering your question right now— and you can take a screen- 
cap of that, and that’s your photo. Okay, let’s see if we have time 
for one more question ” 

He is often mentioned in conversations about Silicon Valley 
leadership as an example of a natural CEO —of a company founder 


He^s such a positive 
force that it seems 
impolite to point 
out that the effect of 
Facebook-the 
effect of Zuckerberg- 
is to take all that 
is interesting 
and reduce it to the 
blandest^ f riendliest> 
least revealing 
version of 
life imaginable. 


86 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 




CALLING ALL CURIOUS 


WWW.FOSSIL.COM 


FOLLOW US ©FOSSIL: 


impolite to p 
out that the eff< 


Fa 


who was also ready to lead. Now the applauding crowd sees why. 
He solved the problem! He came up with a solution! He dashed 
the hopes of a hopeful young woman yet sent her home with 
a screen- cap! But there is something else. He is known for his 
philanthropy but not for his kindness. Indeed, because of The 
Social Network, he is known to many as a borderline sociopath. But 
today, in Barcelona, I could see him doing the work of being kind. 
I could see him trying to be empathetic. And I wondered once 
again if a person who tries so very hard to be good— like Mark 
Zuckerberg— is the same thing as a good person. 

ver the past year, he has done many things, 
claimed many accomplishments. He has bought 
WhatsApp and Oculus in 

a spending spree worth 
$21 billion. He has launched Internet 
.org. He has brought Amber Alerts to 
Facebook and introduced something 
called Safety Check, a system through 
which those in areas enduring national 
disasters can tell their loved ones they’re 
still alive. He has given millions to Ebola 
relief efforts and to a fund that helps 
young undocumented immigrants go 
to college. With the rollout of Instant 
Articles, he has accelerated the mi- 
gration of editorial content to his plat- 
form. He was one of thousands of Amer- 
icans who put a rainbow filter over his 
Facebook profile photo on the day the 
Supreme Court made marriage an equal 
right. And last October, he conducted 
the first of his town-hall Q&As, in 
Beijing, entirely in Mandarin. 

It is hard to say whether this last thing 
was the Facebookiest of all or simply 
the most Zuckerbergian. If you’ve ever 
dreaded going on Facebook lest you see yet another post celebrating 
the excessively accomplished children of friends whose names you 
barely recognize, you can imagine what it is like to be the Facebook 
friends of Drs. Edward and Karen Zuckerberg, formerly of Dobbs 
Ferry, New York, and now residing in Palo Alto. But their son’s half 
hour of Mandarin also grew out of something fundamental about 
him. Mark Zuckerberg is not simply someone who has spectacu- 
larly succeeded; he is also someone who has never failed— someone 
who, when speaking of disappointment or something he might have 
done differently, mentions a 2013 redesign of the News Feed that 
Facebook users didn’t like. “It was a humbling moment,” he says. 

And so it is absolutely characteristic that in addition to doing all 
he does, Mark began challenging himself with annual New Year’s 
resolutions that are difficult, made in public, and transformed im- 
mediately into Facebook fodder. In 2010, he challenged himself to 
learn Mandarin; in 2011, to eat meat only from animals he killed; 
in 2012, to write code every day; in 2013, to meet someone from 
outside Facebook every day; in 2014, to send a thank-you note to 
someone every day, preferably handwritten; and in 2015, to read 
a book every two weeks, most of the selections nonfiction and of 
worthy intention and daunting scope. It is easy to imagine other 
tech titans buying a company like Oculus or undertaking philan- 



lok-t 



effect ui ^uckerberg- 
is to take all that 



thropy equal in ambition to Zuckerberg’s; it is more difficult to 
imagine Larry Page killing a chicken in a chef’s kitchen sink, as 
Zuckerberg did, or Elon Musk sending out 365 thank-you notes. 

I did not go with him to Beijing, but in the video that’s 
available on Eacebook and all over the Internet, he does not 
look like any kind of tech titan when he opens his mouth and 
begins to speak. He looks like a kid again, scared and happy and 
eager for approval. He had a lot of good reasons to go to China 
and do what he did: His wife, Priscilla, grew up in a family that 
speaks Mandarin, and Facebook has been banned in China for 
the past six years. But that’s not why a giddy, guttural sigh and 
a great chorus of laughter arose from the audience at the sound 
of the first Chinese words. Zuckerberg might not have spoken 
Chinese to a Chinese audience just be- 
cause he could— because, you know, 
“I speak Mandarin . . . bitch.” But the 
Chinese sighed and laughed because 
he could, and did. 

So why did such a successful man sub- 
ject himself to such an ambitious pro- 
gram of self-improvement? My own 
theory is that he wanted to make him- 
self more interesting. More precisely, he 
was, like so many denizens of Facebook, 
afraid of being uninteresting, afraid of 
not living up to the expectations he 
aroused in his friends and his follow- 
ers. Zuckerberg, of course, does not see 
it that way and supplies a simple expla- 
nation— an engineer’s explanation— for 
his annual resolutions: “I spend so much 
time running this company, I want to be 
able to do other things outside of that 
too,” he says one afternoon with the 
chuckle of a serious man reminding 
himself to be lighthearted. “I find that 
New Year’s resolutions are a good way 
to force myself to do that. I had one resolution that led me to start 
cooking a lot, something that I do with my wife all the time now.” 

But that’s just it. The resolution he’s referring to was the one 
to eat meat only from animals he himself killed for an entire 
year. It compelled him to kill a chicken, kill a goat, kill a pig. It 
required moral courage and spawned experiences that were, 
by all accounts, profound. But Mark has rarely spoken of it, and 
now, when he does refer to it, he does so in a way that cuts to the 
heart of how meaning is made and unmade on Facebook. Kill- 
ing animals led to him cooking a lot with Priscilla? He might as 
well have gone off to war and come back saying that it taught 
him how to build campfires. 


I 


t Is hard to decide whether Mark Zuckerberg is 
the most interesting boring person in the world or 
the most boring interesting one. He’s important, 
yes— undeniably so. And most people would say that 
the extent of his ambition makes him interesting, because it makes 
him singular even in Silicon Valley. He wants to use Facebook to 
connect everybody in the world and is already about a fifth of 
the way there. But what would Mark do if Facebook didn’t exist? 

“I’d build it,” he says with a shy but somewhat mechanical smile. 


88 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 





^JLcuiks, 

ENGLAND 1825 


THE 

ORIGINAL 

DESERT 

BOOT 






And that’s what makes him interesting. He thinks enough of his 
mission to think of himself as destined to complete it. He thinks 
enough of himself to think that the success of his mission has 
been foretold. 

“Wanting to connect people is a pretty deep thing for me,” he 
says one day, when he’s been answering questions for an hour 
and fatigue has made him uncharacteristically reflective. “It’s 
something that I’ve cared about since I was a kid. My mom told 
me these stories— that a lot of boys when they’re younger have, 
like. Ninja Turtles or some toys and they’re all, like, flghting? I 
just wanted to make them connect and, like, form villages and be 
peaceful and communicate. I was like, ‘Why can’t you guys just 
talk to each other and work out your problems?’ ” 

He says he did the same thing with 
actual members of his family, the ones 
made of flesh and blood. He’s so freaking 
Californian now, so audibly rooted in the 
place where American speech was in- 
vented, the uptalk and the awesomes and 
the thickened, stoned-sounding vowels. 

But he’s from New York, from a town 
flung just north of the city, and he tells 
a story from his childhood with a look 
of something like wonder on his face. 

When he was growing up, there was, 
like, all this snow— “and I would kind of 
force my sisters to have snowball flghts, 
and they didn’t want to do that, so in- 
stead I made, like, a snowball-flght game. 

So then everybody was happy. It was a 
terrible game, but I got to play a game 
and they got to not get hit with snow- 
balls, and it was just a win all around.” 

It’s not just that he wants to connect 
everybody in the world. It’s that he’s al- 
ways wanted to connect everybody in 
the world. He didn’t invent social me- 
dia; there were other platforms available even as he built Face- 
book. But he invented something else: ambition and execution. 
He saw what no one else did, saw all the way to the end, saw that 
all he’d have to do was make Facebook useful and its users would 
do the rest. 

Sure, he’s a little earnest and idealistic, and if you spend 
enough time in his presence, the tedium will make your eyes 
cross. He knows as much. “I am not a cool person, and I’ve nev- 
er really tried to be cool. Our model for Facebook has never been 

to try to make it particularly exciting to use The services 

we aspire to be like in the world are these kind of basic things that 
you can rely on that are there. . . . You go home, you turn on the 
lights. You’re probably not like, ‘Yeah! Electricity!’ It just needs to 
work. The same thing with water. . . . The ability to communicate 
and connect with people should be that, right? It should be some- 
thing that people can rely on. . . . It just should work.” 

Electricity! Water! Well, that’s pretty interesting— the sheer 
balls of it. And surely it’s interesting that he bought Oculus in 
order to introduce virtual reality as a day-to-day communication 
tool for the masses. And surely it’s interesting that when he says, 
“I believe we’ll be able to send full, rich thoughts to each other 
using technology,” you know he’s, like, on it. And surely it’s inter- 


esting that he’s pledged to give half his many billions to charity. 
And Mandarin! He speaks Mandarin! Surely it’s interesting that 
he speaks Mandarin; surely it’s interesting that on the whole, he 
just keeps trying to get better 

But what makes him interesting is also what makes him, at 
times, so profoundly boring. Mark Zuckerberg is the product 
of Facebook just as surely as Facebook is the product of Mark 
Zuckerberg. He didn’t just invent Facebook; he’s been on Face- 
book longer than any other human being in the world. He’s a lab 
rat for any social scientist wanting to determine the effects of 
prolonged exposure to Facebook on the human heart, mind, and 
soul. He is Homo socialis. 

He is our first Facebook friend. 

hen The Social Network 
was released, he found it 
“hurtful.” Of course he 
did. The movie begins by 
characterizing him as an arrogant ass- 
hole and ends by characterizing him as 
an empty one. It is a hypnotic demo- 
lition of a fledgling soul, as thorough- 
going and relentless as its subject. And 
so Zuck took action because CEOs take 
action and he’s CEO . . . well, you know. 
“We took the whole company to go see 
it I think the day that it came out,” he 
says. “There’s this scene in the movie 
where we’re drinking appletinis. No one 
had ever heard of appletinis before this 
movie. . . . Eor a while, everyone around 
the office was drinking appletinis, kind 
of making fun of me in the movie.” 

Yeah, right: The Social Network is 
about appletinis the way killing ani- 
mals by your own hand is about learn- 
ing to cook with your wife. But that is 
the Eacebook effect, and it’s what The Social Network got wrong 
about Mark Zuckerberg. For all its digital trappings, it portrayed 
him as an old-style alpha— scheming, secretive, charmless, des- 
olate. In fact, he’s a new-style alpha: He’s buoyant, empowering, 
optimistic, idealistic, cooperative, endlessly accessible, and overly 
available. He stands for so many of the right things that to criticize 
him is to stand for the wrong ones. He gives you so much of himself 
that it seems churlish and ungrateful to point out that he’s given 
you very little. He’s so open that he’s completely protected, so nice 
that you have to “like” him or else feel irredeemably mean. He’s 
found a way to be dominant without being domineering, and he’s 
not Jesse Eisenberg in that movie. 

He’s Taylor Swift. 

Well, maybe sometimes he’s Jesse Eisenberg. For his thirty-first 
birthday this year, he did what he wanted to do— he went home, 
cooked with Priscilla, played with his dog. Beast, tried to remem- 
ber to post some photos of Beast on Beast’s Facebook page, with 
its two million followers. “I’m a low-key birthday person,” he says. 
“I’d like to just kind of have people leave me alone on my birthday.” 
Indeed, last year, when he was turning thirty, “I actually arranged it 
so that I flew to the other side of the country for my birthday. I was 
like, ‘Oh, maybe if I have somebusi- [continued on page io4] 



90 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 





WE KEPT THE LEGACY. 

EVERYTHING ELSE GOT AN UPGRADE. 

Five generations of Camaro have built a legacy 
that rivals that of any car on the road. And now 
the sixth generation is here. It’s leaner. It’s fitter. 
It’s perfected. And it has arrived. 



CHEVROLET 



THECAMAROSIX.COM 


FINDNEWROADS 


[CONTINUED FROM PAGE 90] ness meetings on my birthday, then 
people at Facebook can’t bug me or try to do an 5 l;hing or surprise 
me.’ I was wrong. I came back, my assistant had filled up my con- 
ference room with balloons. Which was pretty funny, but then— I’m 
a really stubborn person. So then it was like, ‘Oh, that was a funny 
surprise; maybe should we clear the balloons out?’ I was like, ‘No, 
I’m going to just do all my meetings with all those balloons.’ Then 
it gave way to some pretty funny dynamics. Because, you know, the 
normal reviews that I have, a lot of them are pretty contentious. 
Product teams will come in and they’ll talk about what they want 
to do or what they think they’re doing. And I’ll say, ‘Are you really 
doing what people want?’ And we’ll have this debate, back and 
forth. There was this particularly contentious review that we 
had and I’ll just never forget it. Be- 
cause we were sitting there, it was 
ridiculous, we were all up to our waists 
in balloons, and everyone was just so 
sad, and they’re all just sittingthere and 
I’m just like, ‘You guys have to do bet- 
ter work, you’re letting our community 
down, we need to do better workV And 
I think we have this wonderful photo 
of that, where everyone is up to their 
waists in balloons and everybody is just 
like, ‘Oh, man, what are we doing?’ ” 

He tells this story for laughs, but 
also with a sheepish intensity that signals 
the dawn, in Mark Zuckerberg, of some- 
thing like self-awareness. He knows the 
story’s not particularly funny. He knows 
that it’s frankly terrifying, complete with 
balloons that function in the story like 
killer clowns, imbued with a meaning 
counter to what’s intended of them. 

Really, they should be gray— an endless 
succession of gray balloons. But on Mark’s 
Facebook page, they exist only in color, 
in astonishing plenty, and they’re supposed to make you smile. 

e admits that he has not always been open and 
transparent— and that he has paid the price for not 
being open and transparent. Indeed, when he and 

Priscilla were trying to have a baby, he was reluc- 
tant to tell anyone about the three miscarriages she’d suffered, 
fearful that they would mark him and his wife as “defective.” He 
shared the bad news with very few people, and never on his Face- 
book page. Yet it was only when he began talking about the mis- 
carriages with his friends that he began to understand that they 
were not uncommon experiences, and that he had every reason 
to believe that Priscilla would be able to carry a child to term. He 
had learned, all over again, that “in today’s open and connected 
world, discussing these issues doesn’t distance us; it brings us 
together. It creates understanding and tolerance, and gives us 
hope.” No, he wouldn’t reveal what he and Priscilla plan to name 
their daughter, now that they are expecting, but he did say that “in 
our ultrasound she even gave me a thumbs-up ‘like’ with her hand, 
so I’m already convinced she takes after me.” 

And he did post the news on Facebook, prompting 1,715,611 
of his followers to respond to his announcement by pressing the 



“like” button and 111,182 to offer their congratulations. And why 
not? It was happy news, and Facebook is— and is ruthlessly engi- 
neered to be— a happiness machine. In fact, last year, it was dis- 
closed that Facebook had taken it upon itself to experiment with 
the feeds of a few hundred thousand of its users, adjusting them 
for emotional content, trying to find out what made them happy 
and what made them sad. Zuckerberg says that he wasn’t trying 
to be nefarious; it’s just that, well, there was concern that “seeing 
happy posts on Facebook about the moments in people’s lives was 
actually making people sad. . . . We basically ran a relatively small 
test that didn’t show as many happy posts or sad posts, and we mea- 
sured whether they were posting happy or sad things afterward. 

“We don’t want to make people sad,” he says. 

He doesn’t, and one of the most 
striking things about him is how hap- 
py he himself appears. He has made 
several transitions in his life— from 
student to entrepreneur and from 
entrepreneur to executive. He has 
always been willing to play the vision- 
ary. But over the past year he has started 
to play the teacher whose wisdom is 
always available even when he is not. 
And what he knows, above all, is that 
“liking” things— or maybe just liking 
them— makes people happy. 

“Some people have asked for a ‘dis- 
like’ button because they want to be 
able to say ‘That thing isn’t good,’ ” 
he says with a dismissive wave of the 
hand. “That’s not something we think 
is good for the world. So we’re not 

going to build that ” Instead, he’s 

not only going to connect everybody 
in the world, he’s going to give a “like” 
button to everybody in the world, and 
thereby complete humankind’s march 
to the blissful anodyne— a Zuckerberg kind of love. 

“To me,” he says during my final session with him, “happi- 
ness is doing something meaningful that helps people and that I 
believe in with people I love. I think lots of people confuse happi- 
ness with fun. I don’t believe it is possible to have fun every day. 
But I do believe it is possible to do something meaningful that 
helps people every day.” 

It is the kind of thing people say on Facebook, or share when 
someone else has said it. But Mark Zuckerberg has the money 
to act on it, and the gray T-shirts to prove that he means it. His 
friends say that the only way to understand him is to take him at 
face value— to believe that he is exactly what he appears to be. 
But can we believe that? Can we believe that someone of such 
vast wealth and power is as good as the image he works so hard 
to project? He becomes interesting, in an old-fashioned way, if 
he isn’t. He becomes more interesting if he is. lit 

Tom Junod has never spoken to, met with, or occupied the same room 
as Mark Zuckerberg. All encounters described herein took place 
through the screen and were with Zuckerberg’s virtual, disembod- 
ied, and perhaps best self— the friendly visionary who exists on his 
Facebook page. All quotes are Zuckerberg’s. 


104 ESQUIRE -OCTOBER 2015 


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FICTION 

A THOUSAND ISSUES OF ESQUIRE FICTION IN FORTY-NINE SENTENCES 


> Oedipa stood in the living room, stared 
at by the greenish deadeye of the TV tube, 
spoke the name of God, tried to feel as 
drunk as possible. —Thomas Pynchon, 
''The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs. 
Oedipa Maas), and the Testament of 
Pierce Inverarity,'' December 1965 

> Strike spotted her: baby fat, baby face, 
Shanelle or Shanette, fourteen years old 
maybe, standing there with that quea- 
sy smile, trying to work up the nerve. 
—Richard Price, "A Hustler Hustles, 
That's What He Does," May 1992 

> She said, “Poor Beauty’s thirsty.” —Graham 
Greene, "Beauty," April 1963 

> It is, in the end, she thinks, the shallow- 
est of confessions: all of the truth, none of 
the honesty. — Colum McCann, "Treaty," 
August 2015 

> His real name was Frederic Dobson. 

—Vladimir Nabokov (writing as Vladimir 
Sirin), "The Potato-Elf," December 1939 

> His brain told him this was a terrible and 
important affair, but his eyes and his feel- 
ings didn’t agree. —John Steinbeck, "The 
Lonesome Vigilante," October 1936 

> Fact: Over three million men in Eng- 
land have slept with ten or more women. 
—Nick Hornby, "The Bonkus Mirabilis/' 
September 1995 

> Parker understood why he had mar- 
ried her— he couldn’t have got her any 
other way— but he couldn’t understand 
why he stayed with her now. —Flannery 
O'Connor, "Parker's Back," April 1965 

> For the first three years, the young wife 
worried that their lovemaking together was 
somehow hard on his thingie. — David Fos- 
ter Wallace, "Adult World (I)," July 1998 

> As they wheeled her by, he said, “Now 
you are going to have to learn how to love 
something, you wicked woman.” —Joy 
Williams, "The Lover," July 1973 

> I stand, figuratively, with one wet foot on 
Plymouth Rock, looking with some delica- 
cy, not into a formidable and challenging 


wilderness but onto a half-finished civili- 
zation embracing glass towers, oil derricks, 
suburban continents and abandoned mov- 
ie houses and wondering why, in this most 
prosperous, equitable and accomplished 
world— where even the cleaning wom- 
en practice the Chopin preludes in their 
spare time— everyone should seem to be so 
disappointed? —John Cheever, "The 
Death of Justlna," November 1960 

> He was part of that great, unchanging 
order of those who live by wages, whose 
world is unlit and who do not realize 
what is above. —James Salter, "American 
Express," February 1988 

> He was just a kid at war, in love. 
—Tim O' Brien, "The Thi ngs They Carried," 
August 1986 

> The coyote’s jaws, serrated grinders, 
work at the bones of Timmy’s hand. 

— T. Coraghessan Boyle, "Heart of a 
Champion," January 1975 

> No, mein Herr, I believe you are mistak- 
en: the Wall is Life. —Joyce Carol Oates, 
"Ich Bin ein Berliner," December 1982 

> In the pop and hiss of static, you hear voic- 
es whispering to you. —Benjamin Percy, 
"So Far from Anything," October 2007 

> I have a feeling that someone is going 
to find out something about me that will 
mean the end, although I can’t imag- 
ine what. —Joseph Heller, "Something 
Happened," September 1966 

> “She knew I knew she knew I knew she 
knew.” —Kingsley Amis, "Jake's Libido," 
February 1979 

> “Is that a thermometer on your tit,” he 
said, “or are you just pleased to see me?” 

—Martin Amis, "Chain Fiction," Decem- 
ber 1997 

>“Talk into 
my bullet hole.” 

—Denis Johnson, "Steady Hands at 
Seattle General," March 1989 


> The water was black and warm and he 
turned in the lake and spread his arms in 
the water and the water was so dark and 
so silky and he watched across the still 
black surface to where she stood on the 
shore with the horse and watched where 
she stepped from her pooled clothing so 
pale, so pale, like a chrysalis emerging, and 
walked into the water. — Cormac McCar- 
thy, "All the Pretty Horses," March 1992 

> “Are you glad you saw,” he whispered, his 
face frightened. —Jayne Anne Phillips, 
"Bess," August 1984 

> Stop thinking about would-be’s and 
where-else’s. —Philip Roth, "Expect the 
Vandals," December 1958 

> She says. Think of me as dead. —Raymond 
Carver, "Intimacy," August 1986 

> What I didn’t tell you was that I knew 
she was dying and didn’t allow myself to 
think about it— there’s your turntable. 
—Saul Bellow, "Something to Remem- 
ber Me By," July 1990 

> He had a signet ring that he liked to 
press over her eyelids, branding her with 
his initials so that his ownership would 
be clear every time she blinked. —Heidi 
Julavits, "Marry the One Who Gets There 
First: Outtakes from the Sheidegger- 
Krupnik Wedding Album," April 1998 

> It was not her fault that when he went 
to her he was already over. —Ernest 
Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," 
August 1936 

> He was a middle-aged child who had 
never shed its baby fat, though some gift- 
ed tailor had almost succeeded in camou- 
flaging his plump and spankable bottom. 

— T ruman Capote, "Breakfast at Tiffany's," 
November 1958 

> Everyone’s skin is so particular and we 
are so largely unimaginable to one another. 

—Jim Harrison, "Legends of the Fall," 
January 1979 

> They both knew how marriage de- 
stroyed love. —Bernard Malamud, "Life 


106 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


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Marche, Author, Esquire magazine columnist 3 Jason Katims, Creator and 
showrunner, Friday Night Lights and Parenthood 4 Jay Larson, Writer, comedian, 
co-host of Esquire Network's "Best Bars In America" 5 Dad 2.0 Summit Keynote 
speaker Michael Kimmel being interviewed by actor Jason Kravits in Esquire's 
'Live Lounge" 6 John Pacini, Co-founder of the Dad 2.0 Summit, and Adrian 
Uribarri, Editorial Director of the Esquire Mentoring Initiative 7 Guy Kawasaki, 
Silicon Valley-based author, speaker, entrepreneur, and tech evangelist 


Esquire was the Global Media Partner for the 2015 Dad 2.0 Summit which since its inception, has grown into the preeminent 
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the summit with a stirring keynote about changing gender dynamics and the crucial decisions men can make to define their 
emerging family role. Attendees also heard from Forbes contributing editor Samantha Ettus, Pandora co-founder Jon Kraft, 
Esquire columnist Stephen Marche, among others throughout the three day event. 

Jay Larson, co-host of Esquire Network's "Best Bars In America," closed the event with a rousing talk about how fatherhood is 
shaping his career as a comedy writer and performer. 

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Is Better Than Death/' May 1963 

> “If you had fought like a Man, you need 
not have been bang’d like a Dog.” —Jorge 
Luis Borges, "The Widow Ching, Lady Pi- 
rate/' August 1972 

> You could feel the silence freezing 
around people’s mouths. —John Dos 
Passos, "The Celebrity/' August 1935 

> Only when he had discovered his wife 
with a stranger in a parked car did he un- 
derstand that he had never had a stake to 
which he’d been pleasantly tethered. —Ar- 
thur Miller, "The Misfits," October 1957 

> There wasn’t that tireless, irksome, 
bright- eyed hope women kept fluttering 
at you. —John Updike, "The Rumor," 
June 1991 

> She liked drinking, and she liked drink- 
ing in the car, which was something you 
got used to in Montana, where it wasn’t 
against the law, where, though, strange- 
ly enough, a bad check would land you in 
Deer Lodge Prison for a year. —Richard 
Ford, "Rock Springs," February 1982 

> She made herself a thermos of Tom Col- 
linses and she drank them all afternoon 
while her husband attacked the insects 
with his paper torches. —Tennessee 


Williams, "Tent Worms," May 1980 

> He knew that if he did not And his niche 
it was possible that he would crack. 

—Norman Mailer, "The Language of 
Men," April 1953 

> To clarify: It became apparent that we had 
diverged because he was interested in the 
present and I was interested in the future. 

—EthanCanin, 'The Accountant," May1993 

> “Well, kiss my ass!” —William Styron, 
"Shadrach," November 1978 

> All right, drink your fool self to death. 
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, "An Alcoholic 
Case," February 1937 

> It was good advice, but hard to follow 
when you knew your death might come 
through that door, and soon. —Stephen 
King, "The Gingerbread Girl," July 2007 

> This is Action— a game— of pleasures, of 
truth and error, as at the sensual begin- 
ning of a sensual life. —Harold Brodkey, 
"His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft," 
August 1975 

> It showed a crowd of freaks bend- 
ing over a dying fat man on a dark and 
lonely road, looking at a tattoo on his 
back which illustrated a crowd of freaks 
bending over a dying fat man on a. . . 


—Ray Bradbury, "The Illustrated Man," 
July 1950 

> We eat hot dogs and almond crunch 
bars and apply lip balm as part of the pre- 
sleep checklist. —Don DeLillo, "Human 
Moments in World War III," July 1983 

> Sunglasses, tape recorder, fan, umbrel- 
la, satchel, used tea bag, disgusting blob- 
ular something, my tire pump, man, and 
this medicinal herb from the Himalayas, 
the leaves of which bloom only once in a 
thousand years and I have a shipment of it 
waiting for me in a subway tunnel, go Horse, 
go man, out into the real world. —William 
Kotzwinkle, "Horse Badorties Goes Out," 
September 1973 

>Here was the leper! —James A. Michener, 
"The Precious Drop," December 1951 

> Even his voice was somewhat beefy, 
like a T-bone steak made richly audible. 

— Aldous Huxley, "Time's Revenge," 
October 1951 

> She shivered all over like a dog, then 
took a breath. —Louise Erdrich, "Fleur," 
August 1986 

> That was how my great life began. 

—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Blacaman the 
Good, Vendor of Miracles," January 1972 


Fischer, Carl 

THE MAN WHO HELPED DEFINE THE 1960s AS THE PHOTOGRAPHER OF 
NEARLY ALL OF ESQUIRE’S MOST FAMOUS COVERS 


OVER THE PAST few years, the 
covers that defined Esquire in 
the 1960s have been the sub- 
ject of documentaries, muse- 
um exhibitions, and magazine 
features. Much of the credit 
for these covers has gone to 
George Lois, a celebrated ad- 
vertising executive and a cre- 
ative consultant to the maga- 
zine through that decade. Yet 
Lois never touched a camera 
or developed a frame. Instead 
he often turned to Carl Fisch- 
er, a former art director who 
photographed sixty covers 
for Esquire from 1963 to 1972 
and created some of the mag- 
azine's most famous and con- 
troversial images. 

Today, Fischer is a spry, as- 
pirational ninety-one. Recent- 
ly, with his memory clear and 
his voice fueled by a kind of 
insistent nostalgia, he held 
forth for two hours on creating 


those still-sharp-to-the-touch 
images. . . on what exactly 
happened. 

He began to shoot regularly 
for the magazine when Harold 
Hayes became editor in chief 
in 1963, working closely with 
both Hayes and Lois to capture 
what he describes as the "in- 
ner life" of each subject. "One 
of the first assignments Hayes 
gave me was a series of por- 
traits of Southern segregation- 
ists," Fischer says. "He said, 
'Look, we don't want to be 
seen as editorializing. We want 
to be fair and we want to give 
their point of view, so don't 
use your goddamn wide-an- 
gle lens.' He thought that lens 
would make them look bad, so 
while I didn't use it, I did make 
some little changes that I think 
made [the segregationists] 
look as ugly as we all thought 
they were." 


Fischer would go on to pho- 
tograph movie stars and artists, 
politicians and athletes— he 
shot all but two covers in 1968, 
many of them at his studio in 
a townhouse on East Eighty- 
third Street (where he still lives 
and occasionally works)— and 
whether photographing a war 
criminal surrounded by chil- 
dren or a glowering black man 
as Santa Claus in the heat of 
the civil-rights movement, he 
was conscious of the poten- 
tial weight and impact of each 
assignment. "They were never 
just pictures— they always had 
some kind of meaning or sym- 
bolism." Lois often came up 
with the concepts for images, 
and then Fischer would bring 
them to life. But after a decade 
of collaboration, the two had 
a falling-out in the early 1970s 
over Fischer's belief that Lois 
was taking credit for their 


work, even for ideas that were 
not Lois's own. 

After Hayes left Esquire 
in 1973, Fischer gradually 
ceased working for the mag- 
azine, though he had a long 
and much-honored career af- 
terward. He seems vaguely 
amused that the rest of us 
are still talking about his 
classic photographs for this 
magazine. "Hayes always 
wanted something new and 
different and wonderful and 
great. He didn't know what 
it was. / didn't know what 
it was. But I would go out 
and look for it and see what 
happened." 

This is what happened 


TURN THE PAGE TO SEE A 
PORTFOLIO OF FISCHER'S 
MOST FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHS 
FOR ESQUIRE AND HOW HE 
MADE THEM. 


108 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


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OUTSIDE 
THE FRAME 

The most famous and pointed Esquire covers of the 1960s 
were photographed by one man, Carl Fischer (above). But the frames 
he shot on either side of those now-iconic images— some 
shown here for the first time— are revealing and make those 
images startlingly fresh again. 

CARL FISCHER INTERVIEWED BY RICHARD DORMENT 



The Passion of 
Muhammad AM 


APRIL 1968 


• Ali had just gotten his 
title taken away because he 
had refused to go in the 
Army, so he was a martyr. 
Our story was Let's do him 
as a martyr. Who's a martyr? 
Saint Sebastian is a martyr. 
When he got to the shoot, 
we explained what it was 
all about— we never told 
people what they were 
going to do before they 
got to a shoot; they would 
never show up if we did— 
and there was a little has- 
sle given the fact that Saint 
Sebastian is a Christian. Ali 
said, "I'm a Muslim now." 
And so we got Chicago on 
the line and I spoke to 
Herbert Muhammad, Elijah 
Muhammad's son, from the 
Nation of Islam. I told him 
this was going to be a cover 
of Esquire magazine, 
and Herbert Muhammad 
said, "Ch, that's good 
publicity. I'll tell him that he 
can do it." And so Ali did. 

It was a pretty straightfor- 
ward shoot, except that 
the arrows turned out to 
be a major headache. We'd 
practiced on a model 
beforehand, and when we 
tried sticking the arrows 
on the body with glue, they 
were so heavy that they 
hung down. So we put a 
bar across the studio's ceil- 
ing and hung fishing line to 
hold up the arrows. It was a 
pain in the ass, because Ali 
had to stand very still for a 
long time, till we got all the 
arrows lined up at the right 
height. He didn't complain, 
though. He was one of the 
few people in public life 
who was just like his rep- 
utation. He was funny. He 
was relaxed. He wasn't 
a bullshitter. 




no ESQUIRE - OCTOBER 2015 



mm 



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@© 

See page 108 
for more on 
FISCHER, CARL. 

Shazam this 
photo to see a 
gallery of other 
images from 

Fischer's Esquire i 

cover shoots. E/Lj 





\ 



Shazam this 
photo to see 
more of Fischer's 
cover shoots. 



The Final 
Decline and 
Total Collapse 
of the 
American 
Avant-Garde 


MAY 1969 

• I shot Andy Warhol a lot. 
His mother lived up the 
block from me on Lexing- 
ton, and he had a little 
studio on Eighty-seventh 
before he moved down- 
town, and he would be 
available anytime, for no 
money. This was actually 
two shoots. The first, 
to shoot the can by itself, 
took a few days, and I 
dropped marbles in the 
soup and tried to photo- 
graph the marble just as 
it hit the liquid so I could 
get a nice hole. Then we 
invited Andy over, showed 
him what we were going 
to do, and had him stand 
up doing a lot of arm 
things. [George] Lois sent 
it out to a retoucher, and 
the retoucher made one 
print with Andy in the 
hole in the soup. 




112 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 



SONNY LISTON AS 
SANTA CLAUS 


DECEMBER 1963 

• Everybody knew Sonny Liston was a nasty son of a bitch. Make him Santa Claus? 
It was just the wrong thing to do. But that was the kind of cover that Harold [Hayes] 
wanted to do, and that was my assignment— there was no plan B. So I went out to Las 
Vegas, where Liston lived, and met him in a room at the Thunderbird Hotel, and I 
explained what we wanted. He said, “Forget about it. I’m not going to put on any god- 
damn Santa Claus hat.” By the strangest coincidence, the manager of the hotel came 
into the room and brought his little girl [above], a six- or seven-year- old whom Lis- 
ton took affection to. So after he refused to put on the hat, I said, “Well, let’s take a 
picture of what’s-her-name.” He liked her. So we took a couple pictures of her. And 
then I said, “Let’s put a Santa Claus hat on her.” So we put a Santa Claus hat on her. 
And then: “Let’s take the pictures with the two of you together, and let’s take the Santa 
Claus hat off her and put it on you. Just for one shot.” Little by little by little, we took 
a whole bunch of pictures of the two of them. And then little by little got rid of her. 



113 




CHICAGO! 


NOVEMBER 1968 


• The magazine was running a story about the fact that journal- 
ism had become so intrusive, so for the cover I shot a crucifix- 
ion scene— Jesus on the cross, and all around him and on top of 
a truck were reporters with video cameras and microphones. I 
thought it was going to be a terrific cover [re-created from the orig- 
inal image, above], but this all happened at the same time as the 
Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968. All hell started break- 
ing loose and the police were beatingup protesters, so Harold said, 
‘T’m going to send four writers to Chicago. We’ll do a quick story, 
and I want you to do a picture of the writers [from left: Jean Genet, 
William Burroughs, Terry Southern, and John Sack] with some 
beat-up protester.” We all jumped on a plane, got to Chicago, and 
met in the lobby of the hotel that night. I said, ‘T’m going to go 
out to find a location to shoot the four of you. You guys be ready in 
the morning.” So my assistant and I went out and walked around 


the neighborhood. I found this great cobblestone street, and I 
climbed up on a mailbox and had my assistant lie down on the 
street to mimic a beat-up protester. Just then the police pulled up 
and asked, “What are you doing?” I said, “Oh, I’mjust taking pic- 
tures,” and I showed them my press pass. Now, the police hated 
the press. The press was saying they were beating up protesters 
when they thought they were keeping the peace. So when they 
saw I was press, they called in the paddy wagon and took us off 
to jail. Sometime in the middle of the night, they told us we could 
go. I got back to the hotel, and we decided there was no point try- 
ing the shot in another place in Chicago. The next day, we all fiew 
back, and I knew a place on 155th Street that had cobblestone just 
like the one in Chicago. We shot the picture and faked Chicago— 
the guy on the ground is a model— and Harold wanted it for the 
cover. The cover of Jesus on a crucifix was never used. 


Six more from Carl Fischer 



114 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


ALL IMAGES © 2015, CARL FISCHER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 





The 

Confessions 
of Lt. Galley 


NOVEMBER 1970 


• I got a call from Harold 
or Lois— it would have 
been one or the other- 
explaining that we got 
Lieutenant [William] 

Galley and he was coming 
to the studio, and that 
I had to get a half-dozen 
Oriental children, from 
about two to six, to photo- 
graph with him. Everybody 
knew about My Lai [the 
massacre in Vietnam for 
which Galley was convicted 
of murdering twenty- 
two civilians], and I felt 
very shaky about the 
whole thing. Galley came 
to the studio not knowing 
the concept, and some- 
body, it was Lois or Harold, 
said, "Here's what we're 
going to do; this is going 
to show that you're not a 
monster." I don't know all 
the details of the conver- 
sation, but to this day I 
don't understand why he 
ever did it, except that he 
probably thought it would 
make him look good. The 
kids came in. This kid went 
here. That kid sat on the 
lap. Put your arm around 
her. Look directly at the 
camera. Look good. Look 
happy. Look pleasant. 

Galley was very nice. Quiet. 
I didn't like him, and I didn't 
believe he was innocent. 
But, you know, like Nazi 
guards at Auschwitz, it was 
my job. I was uncomfort- 
able doing it, but I don't 
think I would've turned 
down an assignment from 
Harold because I didn't 
agree with it; I respected 
his opinion, and I could 
see why this was his kind 
of cover. It seemed like a 
good, controversial cover. 


115 




Fitness 

See Men’s Health. 



Fitzgerald, 

F. Scott 

It was when he washed up that he made 
his big splash at Esquire. “The Crack- 
Up” was a confession— of having fallen 
down, fallen apart, fallen from grace. 
Yet it wasn’t needy or hysterical— the 
opposite, in fact, its tone strikingly free of 
self-pity. And though self-revelation was, 
ostensibly, its aim, its sole and entire 
point, there was as much concealing of 
self going on as revealing. That Fitzger- 
ald had suffered some sort of breakdown 
was clear; that he also suffered from 
alcoholism, however, was not. 

The three essays that make up the col- 
lection appeared in successive issues— 
February, March, and April 1936— and 
were an immediate sensation. An imme- 
diate scandal, too. Fitzgerald’s peers were 
almost beside themselves with disgust, 
could hardly wait to trash it. Hemingway, 
particularly incensed, called it “whinpng] 
in public” and castigated Fitzgerald for 
“takpng] a pride in his shamelessness 


of defeat.” In writing “The Crack-Up,” 
Fitzgerald was openly admittingto feeling 
like a failure, something men at the time 
simply did not do. More— and here’s the 
real kicker— he made failure seem com- 
pelling, magnetic, sexy. After reading 
him, who could ever look at success— so 
robust, so wholesome, so ^/und- again? 
He changed what turned people on. The 
he-man-Hemingway type was out. A new 
type of male, a less, well, masculine type 
of male— the sensitive rebel, alienated and 
androgynous, as personified by James 
Dean and Elvis Presley and, slightly 
later, Mick dagger and, a lot later, Johnny 
Depp— was on its way in. 

“All songs are sad songs,” said critic 
Dave Hickey, an observation equally true 
of poems, and a poet is what Fitzgerald 
fundamentally was. And unrequited 
melancholy, not love, was his great sub- 
ject: “I remember riding in a taxi one 
afternoon between very tall buildings 
under a mauve and rose sky; I began to 
bawl because I had everything I wanted 
and knew I would never be so happy 
again.” It’s the subject of Gatsby and Ten- 
der Is the Night, of “The Crack-Up” also, 
only nakedly. 

With the essay, Fitzgerald didn’t just 
break the rules, he created a new mode 
of expression or, at least, reinvigorated an 
old one: the personal essay. Its infiuence 
can be seen in the works of Norman Mailer 
and Hunter S. Thompson and, perhaps 
most conspicuously, Joan Didion— “[My 
husband and I] are here on this island in 
the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing 
for divorce”— who outdoes the master at 
self- disclosure that discloses little, inti- 
macies at one remove. David Foster Wal- 
lace, too. Hemingway may have been Big 
Papa, but it was Fitzgerald who fathered 
New Journalism. — LILIANOLIK 

To read "The Crack-Up /' Shazam the 
Fitzgerald illustration above. 




Girls, Varga 

These pinup girls, drawn by Alberto 
Vargas (“Vargas Girl” just didn’t sing, 
so they struck the s) and featured in 
Esquire from 1940 to 1946, were minimally 
dressed, sometimes in military or work 
attire (see RACY). Their long limbs and 
slim waists boosted the morale of World 
War II soldiers, who cast them on the 
noses of fighter planes and pinned them 
to their foxholes. Unlike their predeces- 
sors the Petty Girls (also published in 
Esquire), the Varga Girls didn’t express 
feeble minds and gold- digging schemes in 
their captions but rather the active lives of 
women supporting men in the war effort. 
One Varga Girl sounded a ^ 
bugle horn, while anoth- 
er economized because 
“taxes crush the Axis.” 

A sleeping Varga beau- 
ty’s closed eyes were a memory of wak- 
ing up next to a wife. Miss December 1944 
made a wish for peace. The Varga Girl was 
an emblem to a nation consumed by war, 
and now she’s evidence that World War II 
entered all aspects of American lives— 
even their fantasies. 


Turn the page 
for a classic 
example of what 
all the excitement 
was about. 



Foster, Jodie 


Two-time Academy Award- 
winning actress and former 
Esquire intern. After the 
attempted assassination of 
President Ronald Reagan 
in 1981, investigators found 
a two-page letter to Foster 
from gunman John Hinck- 
ley, stating that he planned to 
shoot the president to win her 
love. (Hinckley became ob- 
sessed with her after watch- 


ing Taxi Driver, followed her to 
Yale, and stalked her for seven 
months.) A year later, Foster 
wrote about the experience: 
"Why Me?" December 1982 
John Hinckley's greatest 
crime was the confusion of 
love and obsession. The trivi- 
alization of love is something 
I will never forgive him. His ig- 
norance only prods me to say 
that he's missing a great deal. 
Love is blissful. Obsession is 
pitiful, self-indulgent. This is a 


lesson I've learned. I'll always 
be wary of people who 
proclaim their love for me. / 
know what love is. Do they? 
I've even been obsessed, 
which is— you'll pardon the 
expression— insane. But any 
emotion carried to excess is 
insanity. Does that make it 
a legal defense? If so, we all 
stand acquitted. Why are peo- 
ple so afraid to admit that they 
have it in them? I could pull a 
trigger. Am I crazy? 


®Q 


Shazam Foster's photograph to read her essay on John Hinckley. 


116 ESQUIRE - OCTOBER 2015 


ILLUSTRATION BY JOE McKENDRY; PHOTOGRAPH BY GARY HEERY 




# haveKINDLE willTRAVEL 


(SKDKUIPER, BANGKOK | Amazon asked if I’d bring the Kindle Paperwhite on my trip 
to Thailand. After wandering the crowded streets of Bangkok, I found my way to the 
floating market on the Chao Phraya river and got lost in the Sonchai Jitpleecheep series. 

Follow more journeys on Instagram (pAMAZONKINDLE 


amazon 





The January 1944 
issue Varga Girl 
(see preceding page). 
Accompanying this 
image was the 
caption "I'm dream- 
ing of my soldier boy / 
Who's in the South 
Pacific, / And there 
each Miss is garbed 
like this/ (The heat 
must be terrific!)" 




► If you talk to God, you're 
praying. If God talks 
back, it's schizophrenia. 
—Phil Spector, 

September 1999 

► God doesn't care that 
I have a sandwich on 
Yom Kippur. He cares 
that I helped a blind man 
across the street. 

—Joan Rivers, May 2007 

► People think I had a 


clear mind and thought 
my way through it. I didn't. 
I prayed. Man, we need a 
boat— a boat come float- 
ing up the street! We 
needed a truck, a truck 
come up the street. 

I needed somebody to 
put this movie out so the 
whole world could see the 
footage. Here come the 
filmmakers! How could I 


believe that God was 
not involved in that? 
—Kimberly Roberts, 
Hurricane Katrina survivor, 
January 2009 

► Did God give me this 
idea? Who knows? I didn't 
suddenly have a view of 
God's face, if that's what 
you mean. In science we 
just don't talk about it 
much. You say, Well, I had 
an idea. In the religious 
world people talk about 
revelations. They are not 
so basically different. 
—Charles H. Townes, 
December 2001 

► Love is huge. But if 
you're talking about men 
and women, it's got to 
start with the most initial 
obvious attraction that 
warthogs go through. 
Look at that ass! That's 
what keeps the world 
spinning. There's your 
God. —Chevy Chase, 
October 2010 



Hemingway, Ernest 

Longtime Esquire contributor whose non- 
fiction and fiction, including “The Snows 
of Kilimanjaro,” appeared in twenty- eight 
of the first thirty- three issues of the mag- 
azine. Won the Nobel Prize for literature 
in 1954; killed himself in 1961; was eulo- 
gized by Esquire’s founding editor, Arnold 
Gingrich, this way: “One of the best friends 
this magazine ever had, and that at a time 
when its need of friends was the great- 
est. . . . We had Hemingway for a start, and 
with his knowledge and blessing, used the 
fact that we had him as a talking point to 
enlist others.” 


TURN TO PAGE 120 TO READ STEPHEN 
MARCHE'S VIVID ACCOUNT OF HEMINGWAY 
IN CUBA, THEN AND ESPECIALLY NOW. 


118 ESQUIRE - OCTOBER 2015 


BOTTOM: ILLUSTRATION BY JOE McKENDRY 


PROMOTION 



Every Article. 

A living archive of Esquire 
from 1933 to today. 

Daily picks. Exclusive new 
essays and commentary. 
Reading lists curated by 
our editors and special 
guests. And all 1,000 issues 
and more, from our very 
first to our most recent. 


$4.99/M0NTH. FIRST MONTH ON US. CANCEL ANYTIME. 


CLASSIC.ESQUIRE.COM 





CONTESTANTS: HENRY HARGREAVES; HEMINGWAY: YOUSUE KARSH 





The 

GHOST, 

HEMINGWAY 

You may hate Papa, but you can never escape him 

BY STEPHEN MARCHE 


Of airilfe^e^d white nkale writers, Ernest Hemingway is 
the ^adest and the whitest and the malest, vanquished as an 
icon and relegatedjto the losing side of so many histories. He is 
an embarrassing cliche. Ever here in his home, La Einca Vigia, 
he i^a monstrous joke. / 

Th^ouse is lyw and flair and white, and despite the hustlers 
and the uhioaiSing tour l^es and the small bar cranking sugar- 
"^ine for overpriced mrfeapple drinks surrounding it, the place 
retaiTw-TTwr otos^gnity. The desks, at which he never wrote, 
look like he could work on them today if he suddenly gave up the 
habit of a lifetime and decided to write sitting down. The origi- 
nal sofa Clark Gable slept on because the beds were too short is 
still there, and the pool in which Ava Gardner swam naked— “the 
water is not to be emptied,” Hemingway told the pool boys— sits 
empty. The rooms are stuffed with memories, which happen to 
be some of the greatest written memories of the twentieth cen- 
tury: an enormous Cape-buffalo head redolent of “The Snows of 
Kilimanjaro,” the bullflghting posters that could serve as covers 
for The Sun Also Rises. With the windows thrown open, Heming- 
way’s house is both airy and compact, calm and full of life. 

Then the U. S. senators show up and Al Eranken can’t stop crack- 
ing jokes. He mugs with a gigantic set of wapiti antlers in the 


@b 


Contestants in the Hemingway Look-alike contest, held annually 
at Sloppy Joe's, Key West, Florida. Shazam any photo on the opposite 
page to read "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." 


small dining room, eking out a laugh from an audience of aides. 
Switching from slapstick to character work, he tries out an im- 
personation of a real estate agent, whispering conspiratorially 
to a bystander that he likes the place but the kitchen needs re- 
modeling. At the dog cemetery— yes, Hemingway had a small 
dog cemetery, right beside the swimming pool— Eranken notices 
a grave marked l i n d a . “Was that one of the mistresses?” he asks 
the guide, who joins in the mild, polite laughter American big 
shots are entitled to. Eranken senses a comedic win. “Do me a fa- 
vor,” he presses. “One out of every ten tours, you should tell them 
that’s his mistress.” 

As the senators drift back from the dog cemetery, down a shad- 
ed stone path back to the main house, I ask Eranken what ev- 
erybody here is asking himself: What’s going to happen to Cuba 
now that the embargo is about to lift? The man takes a stab at be- 
ing a U. S. statesman in a foreign country. “Well, I think it’s about to 
change,” he tries ponderously, with professional noncommitment. 
Then he can’t stop himself, looking up with that smile borrowed 
from the Joker. “I just wanted to get here before the Chipotle.” 



nine 


y wrote his first piece for Esquire a thousand is- 



i there’s still a copy of the May 1935 issue poking 


fron 


lagazine rack in the living room of La Einca Vigia. 


ling) 


in Cuba made Esquire and Esquire, before that, made 


Hemingway in Cuba. 


121 



Before the magazine had a name, Arnold Gingrich, its found- 
ing editor, traveled from Chicago to New York to stalk Heming- 
way, eventually bumping into him at a rare-book shop he was 
known to visit. “It is not too much to say that, at the very earliest 
point, he was our principal asset,” Gingrich remembered in his 
column after Hemingway killed himself in Idaho in 1961— far, far 
from the Havana he loved. 

It seems Hemingway wanted a $7,000 boat. He had $3,500 from 
his second wife, Pauline, who was recovering from a terrible Cae- 
sarean birth and was determined not to get pregnant, and because 
she was Catholic and didn’t believe in birth control, they had only 
coitus interruptus, and she gave him money for the boat because 
she needed to bind her husband to her in some way. Gingrich man- 
aged to find most of the rest— to bind Hemingway to Esquire— 
and together they bought Pilar, a marlin-fishing vessel built to 
Hemingway’s specifications that sits on 
a dry dock at his house in Havana now. 

The history of the star magazine writer 
begins with this purchase. 

Here’s a boat. Go write about the sea. 

WaA WmihgiMy an asshole or a piece 
otsh^ TMO^ilKtion matters. Anybody 
can be m »shole from time to time, but 
a pMOBrof smt® a piece of shit forever. 

Existence or essence? 

Even a cursory look at Hemingway’s 
intimate life, the life he kept from his 
writing, shows that it’s one or the oth- 
er, very probably the latter. If you were 
his friend, he was more than likely to 
betray you. If you were his kid, he was going to ignore you. If 
you were his wife, he was going to beat you. His monstrosity 
was at least half of him. A fishing rod and a pen and his prick 
were much the same device to him: a stick for poking the dark- 
ness, a weapon with which to encounter and defeat the world. 
Hemingway’s love for nature was in destroying it. The rhinoc- 
eroses hunted in “The Short Happy Life of Erancis Macomber” 
are now so near extinction they have armed guards to protect 
them from the kind of person Hemingway was. The thousand- 
pound marlins that Hemingway wrestled from the Gulf Stream 
have more or less vanished; the waters off Cuba have been emp- 
tied of the beasts he craved killing. 

His manliness has also been depleted by time. The macho of 
Hemingway now appears so obviously as a front. Gertrude Stein 
knew it when they met in Paris. “When I first met Hemingway 
he had a truly sensitive capacity for emotion,” she wrote, “and 
that was the stuff of the first stories; but he was shy of himself 
and he began to develop, as a shield, a big Kansas City-boy bru- 
tality about it, and so he was ‘tough’ because he was really sen- 
sitive and ashamed that he was.” That was the modus operandi 
of another generation: the grandfather who came back from the 
Second World War and never spoke about it, the uncles who 
drank themselves and their secrets into oblivion. Hemingway 
kept up the front of the hard man to hide the thorny vulnera- 
bilities within him. 

Now men have figured out another trick: We act weak to hide 
the hardness of our hearts. We display vulnerability to preempt 
judgment. We have been overwhelmed by sanctimony; the public 


@© 

Hemingway's boat. Pilar, which Esquire helped pay for; with a marlin in Havana 
Harbor in 1934, the year after Esquire launched; and sixteen years later 
with a shotgun, perhaps the one he used to take his own life in 1961. Shazam 
the photo of Pilar to read the first story Hemingway published in Esquire. 

shaming of the Internet means that outrage is the dominant tone 
of the dominant medium of our time. Somehow we have drift- 
ed, all of us, into the general assumption that the appropriate 
response to everything— even comedians and R&B songs, nev- 
er mind novels— is to test them against the established pieties 
of the moment. In this miasma of affected virtue, correctness 
becomes paramount in our personal lives as well. How many 
men do you know who live oh-so-correctly? Not embarrassed, 
not saying the wrong thing, not saying it in the wrong way; virtu- 
ous and useless. The new sanctimonies of the Left and the Right 
are much the same; they have the same result, anyway: certi- 
fied writers who leave no trace behind and approvable men and 
women who amount to nothing. The would-be blameless ones. 

The problem with sanctimony is not that it’s wrong but that 
it doesn’t acknowledge the fundamental messiness of human 
nature and of life as it’s lived. Breathing in Hemingway is like 
breathing in the foul Havana air, half-perfume, half- diesel. He is 
rawness and boastfulness and bloody-mindedness and he once 
shot himself while he was trying to shoot a shark and he nev- 
er had a kind word to say about the men and women who es- 
tablished his career and he slept with vulnerable strawberry- 
blond girls and he patrolled the waters off Havana for German 
submarines in a fishing boat like some boy’s own adventurer 


122 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: G A M M A - R A P H O / G E T T Y; ERNEST HEMINGWAY G O L L E G T I O N / J O H N F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM, BOSTON; F O T O S E A R G H / G E T T Y 


and he took strange young men who showed up at his door 
on monthslong fishing expeditions and he tipped big with his 
wives’ money and he despised Fulgencio Batista and he shot li- 
ons and he wrote books. It’s all there in The Sun Also Rises: Go 
and watch a man kill a bull and then watch the man who killed 
the bull fuck a woman. Call it life. 


Hell 


[einim 


/'s first piece for Esquire was “Marlin off the Mor- 
ro: A Cub an Letter,” a great essay crackling with that electric 
Hemingway stuff. It appeared in Esquire’s first issue in fall 1933. 

46i|lfldmder was hooked in the roof of the mouth, was in no 
way tangled in the leader, jumped eight times completely clear, 
towed the boat stern first when held tight, sounded four times, 
but was brought to gaff at the top of the water, fin and tail out, 
in sixty- five minutes.” Readers ate it up. Esquire, at the lowest 
point of the Depression, sold half a million copies a month at 
fifty cents a copy, mostly on the strength of Hemingway. Dur- 
ing the thirties, Hemingway wrote twenty-six articles for Es- 
quire, along with classic short stories like “The Snows of Kili- 
manjaro.” He left in 1937 to write for the short-lived left-wing 
magazine Ken, also edited by Gingrich, mostly on the Span- 
ish Civil War, but even when he was gone Esquire kept print- 
ing him. In the forties, Esquire reprinted the entirety of “The 
Snows of Kilimanjaro,” all of the thing’s nearly ten thousand 
words, but accidentally called F. Scott Fitzgerald by his real 
name for the second time. Hemingway was pissed. 

When you think novelist now, the first word that pops into 
your head is meek and the second is wounded— definitely not 
pissed. Writers today are Brooklyn and Hemingway was Havana. 

From a brand perspective, Jonathan Franzen is the clos- 
est thing to a Hemingway-sized writer now living. When I e- 
mailed him to ask about his thoughts on Hemingway, he was 
polite but wrote that he didn’t want to talk about him; he just 
didn’t care enough. I assumed Cheryl Strayed, a writer who, 
like Hemingway, reckoned a wild identity in the struggle with 
nature, would hate him. He was, after all, a hunter and a prick, 
exactly the kind of dangerous man she had to avoid on her jour- 
neys as chronicled in Wild, but she only vaguely remembered 
him from high school English class. She recalled, distantly 
and fondly, the sad beauty of “Indian Camp”— like a long-dead 
great-great-uncle whose vices as much as his virtues bring 
out a sentimental but distant attachment. He didn’t matter 
enough to hate him. 

Of all the great modernist writers, Hemingway is the least 
admired but the most imitated. Serious readers worship James 
Joyce. They worship Kafka. They worship Borges. But nobody 
tries to write like them, not in America, anyway. And yet every 
section of the bookstore shows Hemingway’s infiuence. “When 
you find a good line, cut it” was Hemingway’s advice to the writ- 
ers of the future. In his lack of metaphors, emphasis on curt de- 
scription, strong active verbs, and masses of dialogue, he has 
had more infiuence on someone like Elmore Leonard than on 
even Raymond Chandler or Jim Thompson. Two of the greatest 
film noirs of all time— The Killers and To Have and Have Not— 
are Hemingway stories. 

He has been equally infiuential on the high-lit crowd. He in- 
vented youthful Americans suffering anomie and wandering in- 
teresting cities without explanation, a pattern followed at reg- 
ular intervals ever since, the latest examples being Tao Lin’s 


TaiPei and Teju Cole’s Open City. The self-writingof Karl Ove 
Knausgaard, Ben Lerner, and the rest— the literary trend of 
our hour— draws a peculiar kind of strength from inverting 
Hemingway’s project. Their trick is that they tell you about 
the banality of their lives and do so in such a boring way that 
it must be true. 

Just to enumerate those under Hemingway’s infiuence— Ray- 
mond Carver or James Salter or Cormac McCarthy, say— kind of 
misses the point. It’s not like writers are reading his books and 
admiring the sentences and imitating them or imitating his im- 
itators. Because they no longer have to. The man is gone— a vio- 
lent white male chauvinist, better left in the rear view of history. 
But his style lives on. In high schools across the country, clear, 
concise writing is simply taught as good writing. Hemingway— 
if not his name, then his style— became the rule. 

If anything, it’s the Hemingway proposition— that a writer 
should live a life worth being written about— that today’s nov- 
elists still wrestle with. He was there at the origin of our partic- 
ular crisis of authenticity: the realest man alive and then, soon 
after, the fakest, writing his life but only a tiny fraction of it, the 
tiny fraction that he wanted the world to see. 

Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Bout includes a letter Grego- 
ry Hemingway wrote to his father: “When it’s all added up, papa, 
it will be: he wrote a few good stories, had a novel and fresh ap- 
proach to reality and he destroyed five persons— Hadley, Pau- 
line, Marty, Patrick, and possibly myself. Which do you think is 
the most important, your self-centered shit, the stories or the 
people?” Sixty-five years later, Gregory’s question can have only 
one answer: The stories mattered much more than the people. 
The people, except for Patrick, are all dead. The stories aren’t. 

Like his clean, pared-down style, his stories live. They haunt. 
Last summer, I saw my son sitting on a dock, his feet dragging 
in the water in the light of lazy contemplation, and I thought 
of that line from “Indian Camp”: “In the early morning on the 
lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he 
felt quite sure that he would never die.” I heard that my grand- 
father had finally moved into a veterans home and I thought of 
that line from “The Killers,” spoken by a boxer about to be killed: 
“I’m through with all that running around.” A friend’s baby died 
from SIDS and I thought of that line from The Old Man and the 
Sea: “A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” and I wondered 
if it was true. Literature survives for the crude reason that, in 
the crises of our lives, it is useful. Hemingway remains useful. 




le ^ing i y is a very useful guide indeed, for bars and ho- 
tels ai^fishing in Havana. The Hemingway experience is not 
|o s luch a movable feast here as a desultory amusement park. In 
lliaJAmbnaMundos hotel, you pay two dollars to visit the room, 
untouched since his departure, where Hemingway wrote A Fare- 
well to Arms and Green Hills of Africa on a standing desk scavenged 
out of a stout piece of square wood, with a pair of rotating screws 
underneath for raising and lowering the height. In the opening of 
“A Cuban Letter,” Hemingway described the view: “The rooms 
on the northeast corner of the Ambos Mundos hotel in Havana 
look out, to the north, over the old cathedral, the entrance to the 
harbor, and the sea, and to the east to Casablanca peninsula, the 
roofs of all houses in between and the width of the harbor.” It is 
exactly the same today. A photograph of Hemingway and Fidel 
looms over the bed. 


123 



A bronze statue of Hemingway at his regular barstool at El Floridita. 

His standard drink, a Papa Doble: 2 oz white rum, 'A oz fresh lime juice, 
1 tsp fresh grapefruit juice, 1 tsp maraschino liqueur. Shake well with ice. 


They make mojitos at La Bodeguita del Medio the way they 
make burgers at a church picnic— without fuss, to be knocked 
back without thinking about it too much. Here, the first wave of 
American tourists has already landed. Not just the adventurous 
ones who used to come through Canada or Panama and made 
sure their passports weren’t stamped. I’m talking little blond 
girls from California who look at the handmade beaded-handle 
purses on the street and discuss plans for mass-manufacturing 
imitations in China— not really for the cost savings but “for the 
consistency of the product.” “You know what these people need 
to learn is to bring the drinks faster,” a lighting designer from 
Milwaukee drunkenly slurs in my ear. “That’s where the money 
is.” A northern Californian, sporting a guerrilla hat with the red 
star on it and a shirt with Obama’s face transposed onto the im- 
age of Che, explains his choice of men’s wear: ‘You need to leave 
the house with a narrative.” He was having “a Commie week- 
end.” You can buy an apartment in Havana, they say breathless- 
ly, for ten grand. What’s that going to be worth in fifteen years? 

At El Floridita, the self-proclaimed “Cradle of the Daiquiri,” a 
life-sized bronze sculpture of the man watches an endless proces- 
sion of tacky, excellent bands play Cuban music that tour groups 
might recognize as Cuban, and the drinks are the outrageous price 
of six dollars a pop. Which means that two drinks and a tip comes 
to the monthly salary of a typical Cuban worker. El Floridita may 
be tacky and touristy, but it is a hell of a fun bar. Smoking a cigar 
in the afternoon as you sit in a cool, dark place slowly drinking 
syrupy cocktails through a little pink straw is its own shadow 
of paradise. El Floridita is the kind of bar where you find your- 
self buying rounds for strangers and then they’re buying rounds 
for you, and eventually you’re taking photographs with a bunch 
of fishermen as they storm the small stage to dance with slim- 
hipped women in fuchsia dresses with plastered-on smiles, and 
then you realize it’s only three in the afternoon. Hemingway is 
always there, smiling benevolently from the corner. Everyone 
wants a picture with him. Everyone wants to throw an arm around 


him. He dignifies the proceedings— the sinful patron saint of 
alcohol and fishing stories. 

Here’s the thing: When you are in Havana, you are not see- 
ing cars like the cars Hemingway saw. You are literally seeing 
the same exact cars. Hemingway suits this out-of-timeness— 
his relics are sacred in the most direct way. Hemingway left 
his Nobel prize medal in the sanctuary of El Cobre, the Cuban 
equivalent of Lourdes, outside Santiago de Cuba, on the south- 
eastern coast. It, too, is a crumbling city with dark corners and 
several different pasts. The Hemingway business sells his es- 
sence of life, but that essence is not so different from Cuba 
itself— raw and unhinged and trapped in several different his- 
tories, and handmade and gorgeous and fleshly and occasion- 
ally cruel. He called himself a “Cuban sato”—SL Cuban mutt— in 
an interview with Cuban television after he won the Nobel, tell- 
ing them that The Old Man and the Sea was “based on Cojimar, 
more or less my town.” 

The American Hemingway failed. The American Hemingway 
killed himself in Idaho. He got tangled in the wires of his self-my- 
thology and finished with the line “The world is a fine place and 
worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.” The Cuban 
Hemingway never failed. He didn’t need to defend the world. The 
Cuban Hemingway somehow is more alive now that he’s dead. He 
has just left Havana and will probably come back any moment. 
You can still imagine him bringing old friends and some dancer 
he just picked up to the bar for a long afternoon binge. You can 
picture him writing in the mornings and then strolling off to the 
nearby woods for a bit of shooting. You can imagine him setting 
off for a day of wrestling with the sea. The ghost of Hemingway 
in Havana is a benevolent spirit. He watches over fishermen. He 
brings tourists into bars to pay for expensive drinks. 

flMd'ohUlnold Gingrich, a blithe, life-loving spirit and an 
pxc^llep: wrijier on fishing himself, built the Hemingway in- 
okstKjLaii ff^l victim to it. In an editor’s note he came to re- 
gr^tjJSngrTch compared his star writer to Cezanne for chang- 
ing the “way of seeing” in American literature. Later, he married 
one of Hemingway’s mistresses, a volatile strawberry blond, 
the lovely and glamorous Jane Mason, whom Hemingway re- 
duced to the wealthy bitch wife in “The Short Happy Life of 
Francis Macomber” (intended for Esquire but published by 
Cosmopolitan in 1936). To Have and Have Not contained a nas- 
ty portrait of Mason too, and while Hemingway and Gingrich 
were out fishing, the editor brought up the slander against his 
future wife. Hemingway thought she should be flattered to be 
mentioned at all. Gingrich remembered the scene in Esquire 
and later in his memoir: ^ 

“It’s a little like having Cezanne include your features in a vil- ^ 
lage scene,” [Hemingway] pointed out modestly. o 

I thought he was kidding, so I asked, “you aren’t mixing your g 
metiers, by any chance?” ^ 

“Not really,” he went on evenly. “After all, what I can’t get ^ 
through your Pennsylvania Dutch skull is that you’re not deal- ^ 
ing with some penny-a-liner from the sports department of the i 
Chicago Daily News. You’re asking for changes in the copy of a ^ 
man who has been likened to Cezanne, for bringing a 'new way 3 
of seeing’ into American literature.” g 

I almost fell out of the boat. This outsized ham was quotingme ^ 
to my face, and without giving me any credit. ^ 


124 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 



In 1963, Gay Talese wrote about the first wave of his disciples 
In tooking for Hemingway.” For a particular breed of spoiled 
Ivy League dilettante, Hemingway was a cipher for Romantic- 
|Kiod literary escape from East Coast proprieties. The greatest 
networker of them all, George Plimpton, led these disciples. “One 
lonely night, before returning home, George took a walk through 
Montparnasse down the same streets and past the same cafes 
that Jake Barnes took after leaving Lady Brett in The Sun Also 
Rises,” Talese wrote. “George wanted to see what Hemingway 
had seen, to feel what Hemingway had felt. Then, the walk over, 
George went into the nearest bar and ordered a drink.” 

James Baldwin knew all the wannabe Hemingways and saw 
through them all. “ ‘They also used to go to Montparnasse, where 
all the painters and writers went, and where I hardly went. And 
they used to go there and hang around at the cafes for hours and 
hours looking for Hemingway,’ ” he told Talese. “ ‘They didn’t 
seem to realize that Hemingway was long gone.’ ” 

By 1967, Esquire was already reporting on the parricides of 
Papa— critics and scholars and other novelists who were starting 
to dismiss the work because they so evidently needed to dismiss 
the man. Esquire joined in with the others as his aura declined. In 
1981, James Wolcott declared the release of Hemingway’s Selected 
Letters, at 948 pages, as “the last big bang of the Hemingway in- 
dustry, the last log to be kindled in his honor.” Malcolm Cow- 
ley defended him. So did James Salter. But it’s all a piece of the 
fundamental sadness that in America, everything that grows too 
big must be taken apart and sold for pieces. Today, you can buy 
Hemingway glasses and watches. You can buy Hemingway furni- 
ture. Hemingway is just another goddamn lifestyle, with another 
goddamn industry to feed and feed off it. Like any brand, it has a 
shelf life. What you buy, you eventually throw away. 

Here is what Cuba has said in resisting the American blockade 
over the past fifty- three years: We cannot be bought. And for bet- 
ter and mostly for worse, they have not been bought. And neither 
has their Hemingway. The opening of Cuba is not really an open- 
ing of Cuba. It’s an opening of America. Cuba isn’t tearing down 
any walls. America is. In Cuba’s new openness, America will find 
in Havana a glorious, fetid human mess, and it will find in Heming- 
way its appropriately messy, appropriately glamorous ghost. 

evening, the Malecon, the five-mile promenade 
Klg the I^Hia seawall, is the most interesting street in the world. 
K^^u^ngSisis in Havana is so severe that some families sleep 
in^HPWm the evening, in the relief of the cool, the city eases 
out from its cramped neighborhoods and moves to the collec- 
tive street. It is a spectacle of secular love. There are young bod- 
ies draped over each other, and middle-aged bodies ensconced in 
each other like stacked folding chairs, and old bodies tucked be- 
side each other like worn bricks. There are stone-eyed fathers 
and sons silently sharing rum, mothers and middle-aged daugh- 
ters arguing over the hang of a blouse, brothers screaming at each 
other about the minutiae of baseball. Political critique plays out 
in jokes. “Cuba has eleven million people and six million police.” 
“We have three sources of information: Fidel, Fidel, and Fidel.” 
What is secret in other cities is forced into the open here: An old 
white man lugubriously makes out with a young black woman; a 
girl pulls away from the bite of an overeager mouth; a family stops 
short, all at once, frozen in the shared, unspoken memory of anoth- 
er time by the strumming of a passing guitar. A few in the crowd 


face the sea, where ninety miles or so into the darkness, the Unit- 
ed States of America lurks. 

In Cuba, the memory of Hemingway is the stand-in for the mem- 
ory of America, the loved and despised other country, the adored 
enemy, the closest place that is impossibly far away. His house. La 
Finca Vigia, is the rare case of a cultural artifact of genuine geo- 
political importance. On the Cuban side, generations of preserva- 
tionists have struggled against the embargo. It’s not just the total 
lack of funds that has made the preservation so difficult; it’s also 
the fact that most of the necessary equipment is produced in the 
United States— it was illegal to export Bookkeeper-brand paper 
preservative to Cuba, for instance. Then, in 2001, Jenny Phillips, 
who is, among other things, the granddaughter of Hemingway’s 
editor. Max Perkins, visited Cuba and enlisted the aid of Jim Mc- 
Govern, a congressman from Massachusetts, to help preserve this 
legacy. They began working with the Cuban authorities and the 
State Department to find ways to bring in American equipment 
and expertise. In 2002, the Finca Vigia agreement was signed. To 
everybody’s surprise, Fidel himself showed up at the signing. (Due 
to the risk of assassination, Fidel’s visits tend to be surprises, with 
commandos hiding out in the trees.) 

“I gotta be honest with you,” McGovern says today, “it was a lit- 
tle bit surreal. That I was sitting there, signing a document with 
Fidel Castro. And I was thinking, I hope I’m not violating the Lo- 
gan Act or something.” Hemingway is synonymous with the hope 
of reconciliation between the U. S. and Cuba. “He’s the one thing 
we have in common. Ever 5 l;hing else we fight about. The one thing 
that people cannot disagree about is Hemingway.” 

The embargo is still affecting the work of the house. Hemingway’s 
old Chrysler needs pieces they can’t yet bring in legally. There’s a 
space for the Kenmore stove that he used in the kitchen. I assume 
some tourist who works at Chrysler and another who works at 
Kenmore will show up soon and just send them the parts. But they 
can’t yet. I asked the director of the museum, Ada Rosa Alfonso, 
a woman with an auntlike sense of personal pride in the place, 
how many tourists she was expecting when the embargo lifted. 
They have eighty thousand visitors now, she explained, lighting 
a complacent cigarette, and they were expecting twenty thou- 
sand more. Surely she meant two hundred thousand more? No, 
she meant twenty thousand. To my discredit, I laughed. Ada Rosa 
didn’t laugh. She shrugged. 

“You cannot fit America into Cuba,” she said. We will see. 


Ho OK is having a better afteriife than Ernest Hemingway. 
Plo p!je iklenjoying eternity more. Late into the night at El Floridi- 
QH ebecers plant kisses on his bronze cheeks. A Shen- 
isman places a lit cigar to his lips for a laugh. In a qui- 
eter moment, in between sets, a middle-aged man with sloppy 
drunken eyes slides over to the statue. This man, I can tell, is an 
American because he regards Hemingway as his equal. He ap- 
pears to be having some kind of conversation with the dead man, 
telling him his secrets, describing his divorce. 

“I like to listen,” Hemingway once said. “I have learned a great 
deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.” 

He remains as omnipresent as ever— the Papa we hate but al- 
ways come back to. In a dark tourist bar, on a tumbledown cor- 
ner of one of the most isolated cities in the world, with ever 5 l;hing 
about to change and everything about to stay the same. Papa lis- 
tens, waiting for the rest of his countrymen. 


125 



Turn heads, even in stealth mode 


m s Bi ' 


2015 CHEVY SILVERADO MIDNIGHT EDITIDN 



MONOCHROMATIC MOLDINGS, SPRAY-IN BEDLINER AND CUSTOM 
18" WHEELS WITH DURATRAC® TIRES IN THE Z71 OFF-ROAD PACKAGE. 





FINDNEWROADS 










HOAX 

ALI LARTER, ACTRESS, 

ON BEING “ALLEGRA COLEMAN,” “ACTRESS 


IN NOVEMBER 1996, Esquire 
introduced the world to 
Allegra Coleman, the 
world-weary twenty-two- 
year-old beauty who hung 
out with Deepak Chopra 
and Nic Cage and swiped 
roles from A-listers. 

And who, it turns out, 
didn't exist: 

I was only twenty. It was 
the very beginning of my 
career, when I was still just 
modeling. I had worked 
with the photographer, 
Troy House, before, and 
he told me that Esquire 
was creating a fictional 
actress to comment on 
the whole phenomenon 
of the Hollywood ingenue. 


So we went down to the 
Santa Monica Pier for the 
shoot, and I just kind of 
acted out what I thought 
would be inappropriate 
behavior in that kind of sit- 
uation. It was so much fun 
to sink my teeth into the 
drama of it. And then all of 
the red-carpet photos and 
movie stills were super- 
imposed. What I thought 
was so brilliant about the 
article was how it was just 
one shade away from real- 
ity. If you just skimmed it, 
you could almost believe 
it. But if you read it and 
then you believed it, well, 
that's your issue. But of 
course, most people don't 


really read articles in Hol- 
lywood. So people were 
calling, like, "Is that Alleg- 
ra? Who is that?" But I did 
actually meet my manager 
through this cover, and I'm 
still working with him to- 
day. After the piece came 
out, I remember coming 
into the offices to meet 
the editor in chief, Edward 
Kosner, and he was just 
laughing and enjoying the 
controversy. I don't think 
they realized how much 
attention it would get. 

That thing opened so 
many doors for me, and 
I ran right through them. 
No regrets at all. 

-AS TOLD TO JULIA BLACK 



Shazam the image below to read the original 
excerpt from All the Pretty Horses. 



Horses, All the Pretty 

Cormac McCarthy credits Esquire's 1992 ex- 
cerpt with pushing him through to a mass 
audience. The story includes this editors' 
note: Tales abound about Cormac McCar- 
thy. That he lives under an oil derrick in 
west Texas. That he never talks. That he 
used to be a vagabond, roaming the de- 
crepit back streets of Knoxville, Tennes- 
see. That he was a truck driver, a ditch- 
digger. That he composes his fiction in 
motel rooms, walling himself in with 
stacks of arcane reference books. That 
he’s got a floor piled high with unpub- 
lished novels. Apocryphal? Who knows? 
Who, in the end, really cares? It’s his work 
that has inspired such legendmongering. 
Nobody talks about bad novelists this way. 


DUBIOUS 


ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS 


2001 

▼ 

JUST WATCHING 
THEM DIE IS PROBABLY 
EVEN EASIER 

The American Heart Association 
issued new, simplified instructions 
designed to make learning CPR 
much easier. Some steps that were cut 
out include looking for a pulse, 
trying to position one’s hands per- 
fectly atop the breastbone, and the 
Heimlich maneuver. 


128 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


ILLUSTRATION BY MARSHALL ARISMAN 










FALL 2015 

Bleecker Chrono in navy 

MACY’S 

coach.com 



NEW YORK 




Interacting with the Ladies 

ADVICE WE (MOSTLY) NO LONGER FOLLOW 




HOW TO HANDLE A ^XATFIGHT'' 

"When I see one of these coming on I first 
remove all the loose objects from the bar, 
such as ashtrays, glasses, bottles and 
plates " —May 1934 
2015 update: Invest in break-resistant 
glassware and when a fight occurs, 
quietly back out of the room. 



HOW TO LIE SUCCESSFULLY 
TO A WOMAN 

"Keep it short, simple and emphatic. 

Overelaborate prevarication 
will arouse instant suspicion, and her 
self-respect will impel her to 
trap you." —July 1962 
2015 update: Not lying also works. 



Jazz, Esquire All Stars 

An annual honor conferred by the maga- 
zine on jazz musicians from 1943 to 1947, 
based on a poll of critics led by jazz com- 
poser and producer Leonard Feather. It 
dominated the field during those years, 
elevating performers and styles— like 




bebop— to prominence with related con- 
certs and albums, including Coleman 
Hawkins’s recordings of “Esquire Bounce” 
and “Esquire Blues.” 


HOW TO COMPLIMENT 
A WOMAN 

"Don't compare her with other women. 
Blatantly tactless is the 
'I always thought my wife had the 
best [eyes, breasts, legs, et cetera], 
but yours are terrific.'" —May 1982 
2015 update: We got nothin'. 

Solid advice. 


HOW TO GET OFF A BUS OR 
TRAIN WITH A WOMAN 

"Unless she's bigger and stronger, the 
man should always precede the woman 
off a bus or train so that he can turn back 
to offer a helping hand." —May 1985 
2015 update: Turns out women 
know how to get off buses and trains 
by themselves. 


ful communication 
into an undifferentiat- 
ed mass of content. Oh 
well. Esquire stepped 
into this parallel uni- 
verse in 1995— along 
with The New York 
Times, eBay, and Ama- 
zon— with the launch of 
its first Web site (left). 
Readers could click on 
Esquire's favorite "hot 
links" to "roam on-line 
from site to site in 
cyberspace." ("These 


Internet, The 


A parallel universe of 
information that has 
dissolved all meaning- 


hot links are what the 
Web is all about... who 
you are is reflected by 
the links listed on your 
home page: that's the 
whole point of a point 
of presence.") Among 
the links: Paul's Hot- 
tub, a site that tracked 
the water temperature 
of a hot tub (presum- 
ably owned by a man 
named Paul) in Ypsi- 
lanti, Michigan. Happy 
twentieth anniversary! 


COLEMAN 

HAWKINS 


LEONARD 

FEATHER 


130 ESQUIRE -OCTOBER 2015 


©o 


Shazam the image of the disc above to listen to Hawkins's recording of "Esquire Bounce." 


ILLUSTRATION BY JOE McKENDRY; RECORD: BEN G O L D S T E I N / S T U D I O D; EEATHER: M E T R O N O M E / G E T T Y; HAWKINS: L I P N I T Z K I / R O G E R V I O L L E T/ G E T T Y 




SCULPTURE BY ADAM BEANE 



Jobs, Steve 

WHAT IS GENERALLY CONSIDERED the best, and last, 
intimate profile of Jobs published in a magazine was written by 

Joe Nocera for Esquire's December 1986 issue— "The Second 
Coming of Steven Jobs": 

(Jobs had been fired by Apple a little more thanayear earlier and 
was starting his new computer company, NeXT.) 

One moment he’s kneeling in his chair, the next minute he’s 
slouching in it; the next he has leaped out of his chair entirely 
and is scribbling on the blackboard directly behind him. He 
is full of mannerisms. He bites his nails. He stares with un- 
nerving earnestness at whoever is speaking. His hands, 
which are slightly and inexplicably yellow, are in constant 


by Tom Junod, October 2008: 

And that’s why the spectacle of Steve Jobs in- 
troducing the iPhone 3G in June was so moving. 
It wasn’t just that he was withered, and that his 
black mock turtleneck was bunching up like a flag 
on a listless day; it was that Steve Jobs was with- 
ering within the idea of himself. Gaunt as a pi- 
rate, dressed in what had heretofore been the vestments of 
his invulnerability, he was still speaking in the voice of a boy- 
inventor from a Mickey Rooney movie, he was still talking about 
Apple’s “really great . . . really beautiful . . .” products, he was still 
the Alpha Adolescent, he was still making his bid in the only way 
he knew how. And the bid— for immortality, for influence, for a 
multiplication of himself both within and without the terms of 
himself— was, in the form of the improved iPhone, there in the 
palm of his hand, which is precisely where he’s always wanted 
it. . . . Except it was clear that, in this case, he had started some- 
thing he might not be able to flnish. Not just because he was so 
sick, but rather because the iPhone was so alive. 


@b 


A sculpture of Jobs created for Esquire in 2012 by 
Adam Beane. Shazam the tinted box at the bottom of 
this page to read Joe Nocera's now-classic 1986 profile. 


motion: pushing back his hair, propping up his chin, 
buried snugly under his armpits. When he hears 
somethingthat intrigues him, he curls his head toward 
his shoulder, leans forward, and allows a slight smile 
to cross his lips. When he hears something he dislikes, 
he squints to register his disapproval. He would not 
be a good poker player. His speech is also mannered, 
full of slangy phrases. “If we could pull this off,” he 
is saying enthusiastically, “it would be really, really 
neatl” “The original idea was good,” he is saying about 
some failed project at Apple. “I don’t know what hap- 
pened. I guess somebody there bozoed out.” Around 
the room there are knowing smirks. To bozo is a 
favorite Jobs verb, but where he once used it mainly 
to describe some bit of stupidity perpetrated by, say, 
IBM, he now uses it just as often when he’s talking 
about Apple. 


IN 2008, ESQUIRE PROFILED Jobs again,without 
his cooperation, on the occasion of his first public 
appearance in several months— at Apple’s annual 
Worldwide Developers Conference— amid rumors 
about his health. 

"Steve Jobs and the Portal to the Invisible," 



JUST 
a Little 
More from 
Woz 


See BLUE BOX, 
SECRETS OF THE 
LITTLE. The teenage 
Steve Jobs and his 
Berkeley-student friend 
Steve Wozniak were ob- 
sessed with blue boxes 
—electronic devices 
that could hack into 
long-distance phone 
lines for free by mim- 
icking the phone com- 
pany's high-frequency 


tones. Wozniak used it 
for prank calls, among 
other things. He once 
called the Vatican, he 
says, pretending to be 
Henry Kissinger, and 
almost got to the pope 
before a suspicious 
bishop called the real 
Henry Kissinger. 

But It also became 
Jobs and Wozniak's first 
business. "So Steve 


said, 'How much does 
it cost to build it?"' 
Wozniak recalls, "and I 
said, 'Seventy-five dol- 
lars.' He said we could 
sell it for $150. And 
back then that was like 
$1,000 or $1,500 to- 
day, and we said, 'How 
could that be!"' 

They went from 
Berkeley dorm room 
to dorm room and sold 


their (illegal) blue box- 
es for $150. "We'd do 
our presentation," he 
says, "where I was the 
emcee talking about all 
the folklore of phone 
phreaking. Steve was 
there to do the sales 
and money. You've 
read books about Steve 
Jobs [version] 1 and 
Steve Jobs 2; this was 
Steve Jobs 0." 


133 





Ken, aka Wisdom 
or Knowledge 

A short-lived offshoot of Esquire that was 
published in the late 1930s with the pur- 
pose of producing explosive and contro- 
versial magazine features, such as Ernest 
Hemingway’s dispatches from the Spanish 
Civil War and a first-person report from a 
Los Angeles prostitute. 


DUBIOUS 

ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS 


2005 

▼ 

CONFIRMING WHAT 
WEWE ALWAYS THOUGHT 
ABOUT BARNARD 

On her Web site, Martha Stewart 
described the West Virginia 
minimum-security prison where 
she is serving her five-month 
sentence as “like an old-fashioned 
college campus— without the 
freedom, of course.” 



KENNEDY. JOHN F. 


THERE EXISTS NO PHOTOGRAPH in which he is not immaculate. Take the 
Esquire cover from November 1973, ten years after his death. The shirt he is wear- 
ing while eating an ice cream cone on summer holiday is somehow the ideal shirt for 
eating an ice cream cone on summer holiday. He was more than a classic, more than 
an icon of style; he was a specimen of casual elegance whose nonchalance was al- 
most cosmic. And America basked greedily in the reflected glow of that perfect confi- 
dence. It made him president, and it made him the ideal subject for Esquire magazine. 

The remote glamour of John F. Kennedy has only been amplified in the half century 
since his death. In 2015, he is as separated from real life as the carved saint in the niche 
of a medieval cathedral. Ask who he really was and the answer now is a gauzy sense 
of the new frontier and American tragedy, idealism destroyed. His glamour cloaks 
him in an aura of invulnerable splendor. At best, he is half history, half myth today. 

But if you want to see him in the flesh, at a time before he was pure iconography, 
the pages of Esquire magazine are where to turn. Very early on, even before his 1960 
presidential bid, Esquire writers sensed a strange vulnerability in the man. In the 1957 


®o 


Shazam the painting of JFK to read Mailer's "Superman Comes to the Supermart." 


134 ESQUIRE -OCTOBER 2015 


ILLUSTRATION BY AARON SHIKLER, REPRODUCED COURTESY OE THE ARTIST AND DAVIS & LANGDALE COMPANY, INC., NEW YORK 







MEMORY FOAM 


WiTH 




piece “Who Will Win in 1960?” he was singled out for the novelty 
of his triumphant appearance on television at the Democratic con- 
vention in 1956: “He reached the publicity stratosphere with one 
rocket burst of television and stays there, floating effortlessly like 
a satellite, worrying the hell out of other, earthbound Democratic 
hopefuls.” Even then they knew that his strange suspension of 
the gravity of American politics was only temporary. “Time con- 
sumes Kennedy’s greatest asset— youth,” a headline declared in 
1959. Little did the writer know how accurate that prediction was. 

Camelot was always built on clouds, even before it was built. 
In 1960, Norman Mailer described JFK as the first “hipster can- 
didate” and recognized, with a mixture of hope and trepidation, 
the birth of a new type of politics revolving around his appear- 
ance. In “Superman Comes to the Supermart,” Mailer detected 
a strange depression hovering over the delegates at the 1960 Dem- 
ocratic convention, which at first, given the allure of the man 
they were there to nominate, seemed inexplicable. Then Mailer 
saw Kennedy himself “I understood the mood of depression which 
had lain over the convention, because Anally it was simple: the 
Democrats were going to nominate a man who, no matter how 
serious his political dedication might be, was indisputably and 
willy-nilly going to be seen as a great box- office actor, and the con- 
sequences of that were staggering and not at all easy to calculate.” 
That reality has swallowed us so thoroughly and for so long that 
we can no longer see it properly. It is worth remembering nonethe- 
less: There was a time when Americans elected their candidates 
for qualities other than their image— the time before Kennedy. 

Celebrity culture overwhelmed political culture. Kennedy 
and his family— a collection of catastrophes somehow described 
as a dynasty— satisfied a democratic people’s eager craving for 
aristocracy. His assassination made it impossible to prevent his 
elevation into an American deity. That moment of death and res- 
urrection was reflected in Esquire, too. The January 1964 issue 
was at the printing press when Kennedy was killed, and desperate 
editors blocked the Kennedy jokes in the Dubious Achievement 
Awards with blue ink. In June 1964, Tom Wicker wrote “Kennedy 
Without Tears,” an act of resistance to the mythmaking that was 
under way. It was the last possible moment to point out Kennedy’s 
obvious failures— his reluctance for civil-rights legislation, the 
Bay of Pigs, Vietnam. He was a C student not just at Harvard 
but as president. Yet even Wicker, by the end of the piece, was 
swept up in Kennedy’s genius for self-projection. “So with his 
football coach’s will to win, with his passion for ‘the ability to do 
things well,’ Kennedy had had his dreams and realized them,” he 
wrote. “But I believe he stood on the sidelines, too, even while the 
game was going on, measuring his performance, wryly remarking 
upon it. . . . Perhaps he knew all along that events would control. 


June 1964 

action overwhelm, means fail to reach ends.” 

There is a certain self-mourning to these early accounts. The 
writers recognized, if dimly, that the old world was passing and 
with it the way of grasping at reality with words. Image would now 
be everything. In the face of Kennedy’s photogenic command, 
nothing any mere writer could put on paper would matter much. 
Mailer and Wicker were watching the style machinery as it was 
built, for a moment both outside and inside, and that’s as much 
as you can ask for from a witness. But everyone who followed 
was in the grips of an obsession with the Kennedy iconography. 

This obsession remains more or less inevitable. No one has been 
written about in Esquire more regularly or more thoroughly than 
John F. Kennedy (including “JFK at 86,” by Charles P. Pierce, in 
2003, and “The Flight from Dallas,” by Chris Jones, in 2013). No 
one has appeared on more Esquire covers. His photographs are 
his true legacy— the touch football with his family; that awkward, 
sexy conversation with Marilyn Monroe; the pause to flx a cuff 
link at the ambassador’s ball in London in 1938; the unthinking 
smile from the Lincoln convertible in Dallas, just before. No one 
flipping through the glossy pages cares what he did, or what he 
believed, or even, really, who he was. He was just too beautiful. 

Wicker thought Kennedy was capable of watching himself 
from the sidelines. We’re all like that when it comes to Kennedy. 
It’s impossible not to believe, even if you know it’s unreal. 

-STEPHEN MARCHE 







November 1973 


June 1977 


November 1991 


January 2010 





October 1968 


136 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


Shazam the image at top to read "Kennedy Without Tears." 








Libel 

In 1972, Esquire settled a lawsuit brought 
by William F. Buckley Jr. that claimed an 
article by Gore Vidal published in 1969, 
“A Distasteful Encounter with William 
E Buckley Jr.”— written in response to an 
earlier article Buckley had written about 
Vidal (they hated each other)— had libeled 
him. Esquire paid a reported $115,000 to 
Buckley for his legal expenses. When the 
Vidal piece was reprinted in a 2003 
anthology, Esquire’s Big Book of Great 
Writing, Buckley threatened to sue again, 
this time receiving $65,000 in legal costs 
and damages and a commitment from 
the magazine to destroy any copies of the 
anthology not already distributed. 


DUBIOUS 

ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS 


1972 

▼ 

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, WILLIAM 
HALL DRILLED SEVEN HOLES 
IN HIS HEAD WITH A POWER 
DRILL. ..AND LIVED! 

William G. Hall of Shrewsbury, En- 
gland, killed himself by drilling eight 
holes in his head with a power drill. 


1996 

▼ 

WE D\DKT KNOW THE OLD 
BOY HAD IT IN HER 

According to his valet. Prince Charles 
had sex with Camilla Parker Bowles 
in the bushes outside a royal 
residence in western England while 
Princess Diana slept inside. 



> Wisdom and love have nothing to do with each other. 
Wisdom is staying alive, survival. You’re wise if you don’t 
stick your finger in the light plug. Love— you’ll stick 
your finger in anything. —Robert Altman, February 2004 

> As to love, I’m reminded of when I was a child growing 
up with my grandparents in eastern Kentucky One 
morning, I was looking out the window and seen my 
grandfather walking up the sidewalk. He goes into my 
grandmother’s bedroom and hands her a flower and 
tells her her face looks like a beautiful May morning. 

To me, that’s love. —Larry Flynt, March 1999 

> Love is not enough to save a relationship. 

—Garry Shandling, January 2003 

> The most horrendous feeling ever is to lose a child. My 
first daughter, Barbara, was tall, skinny, had a heart like I 
had. She went to live with her mom, and she did drugs. And 
so I said, “Barbara, you’ve got to go to rehab.’’ And she said, 
“I’m not going to do that. Dad, because if I do, then out of 
all the Chapmans, I’ll always be remembered as the one 
who went to rehab.’’ Because I loved her so, so much, 

I didn’t make her go. I loved her so much that I loved her 
to death, because two weeks later she got killed in a car 
accident. Forever I will live with, “I could have saved her.’’ 

If you really love them, you’ve got to really love them. 
—Duane "Dog" Chapman, January 2009 

> When I was about to become a father, my friend Burgess 
Meredith said, “You’re gonna find something wonderful— 
someone you love more than yourself” For self-centered 
people, it’s a great blessing. —Peter Boyle, October 2002 

> When all dust settles, love covers all. 

—Jesse Jackson, January 2009 


138 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


ILLUSTRATION BY JOE McKENDRY; PHOTOGRAPH: ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES/ABC VIA GETTY 










Loved, Women We’ve 

SOME REPEATEDLY. A FEW FROM THE BEGINNING. 


THANK YOU. For showing us how you make a sandwich and 
teaching us how to make a pie. For letting us follow you down 
makeshift red carpets and meeting us in hotel lobbies when you 
had other places to be. For sitting down to tell us about how you 
grew up on a military base in Japan— or about the hooked rug on 
your wall memorializing two pigs named Jack and Pete. For let- 


tingus photographyou with a drone. Because it was fun and so are 
you, Chrissy Teigen. To Sharon Stone. To Angelina Jolie. To Helen 
fking Mirren! And especially to Mary-Louise Parker, for makingus 
pose naked in front of a camera so that we too would know what it 
feels like to bare ourselves. To all of you, for being smart and funny 
and decent. We are grateful. Thank you. -ESQUIRE 


140 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


ROBERTS; LANCE STAEDLER; OPPOSITE PAGE: CRUZ: LORENZO AGIUS; PARKER: GEORGE HOLZ; 
JOLIE: ISABEL SNYDER; SWINTON: JONATHAN GLYNN-SMITH 




“She was the one 
with the 
giant . . . mouth, 
like Carly Simon 
only not that big. 
Funny nose too, 
kinda turned up at 

the end Has these 

great eyes too. 
Dark. Big. Look 
right into you. 
Very warm.” 
—On Julia 
Roberts, 
March 1989 


“European Holly- 
wood crossover 
in the Sophia Loren 
mold, but Spanish.” 

—On Penelope Cruz, 
August 1999 


“No! We were not 
going to fall for 
another obscenely 
young and tender 
actress sidling up 
to our subconscious 
and murmuring 
sweet as sin: ‘Love 


me, gimme a Tony, 
make me reeeeally 
famous.’ Then we 
saw Prelude to a Kiss, 
and thought. Any- 
thing you want ” 

—On Mary-Louise 
Parker, 
August 1990 


“If she were going to 
place a personal 
ad, it would read, 
‘Leave me alone.’ Or 
it might say, ‘Look- 


ing for a very secret, 
very straight night of 
reckless abandon to 
do all the things I’ve 
never done before.’ ” 
—On Angelina Jolie, 
February 1998 


“She is a soldier’s 
daughter who 
admits to being 
moved by the sound 
of marching bands.” 
—On Tilda Swinton, 
November 1996 


141 




Mailer, Norman 

Wrote more than a dozen stories for Esquire, 
beginning with his short story ''The Lan- 
guage of Men” (April 1953) and including 
his classic examination of JFK, "Superman 
Comes to the Supermart” (November 1960), 
plus a regular column in 1963. He wrote his 
novel An American Dream as a serial, un- 
der deadline, for the magazine in 1964. But 
it was— especially with editor in chief Har- 
oldHayes—a longlove/fk-you relationship: 
June 12, 1970 
Dear Harold, 

About a year ago some kid who started 
to work for Esquire came over to me 
and suggested I do a piece for Esquire 
on Fidel Castro and I said “Do you know 
what would happen? I would spend two 
months getting ready to do the piece and 
then a lot of time in Cuba and then I would 
work at writing the piece for a few months 
and maybe it would be the best thing I’d 
ever done and then Esquire would print a 
picture of Fidel Castro on the cover with 
Richard Nixon’s asshole installed on his 
forehead.”. . . [Tjhere’s a philosophical 
gulf between us. Don’t you remember 
how, even in the good old days, we never 
knew what to say to each other? 

Ciao, 

Norman Mailer 



Male Genitalia, 

Euphemisms for 

> “Lemons dropped into an old plastic shopping bag.” 

—Chris Jones, "What Kind of Underwear Should You Be 
Wearing?" February 2014 

> A wooden ruler whereupon inch mark six is incorrectly 
identified as seven and inch mark seven as ten. 

—Cover, "The Truth About Male Vanity," March 1997 

> “The dowsing rod of his manhood.” 

—Scott Raab on Don Zimmer, "The Slow Boil," May 1999 

> A plug-in industrial drill atop a pair of spherical appendages. 

—Photo from "The Package," January 2000 

> “Fine bobbing nest of himself ” —Tom Junod on 
Mr. Rogers, "Can You Say ... Hero?" November 1998 

> A saguaro twice as tall as the white- clad man standing 
between the large, fieshy stem and two secondary cactal 
protrusions. —Photo from "The White Brigade," April 1993 


©o 


Shazam the illustration of Mailer above to read "The Language of Men." 


142 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


ILLUSTRATION BY JOE McKENDRY; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY DAN WINTERS 





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Man, The 70s 

TURNS OUT HE WAS A PROPHET 










GOD BLESS you/70s Man. 
You've got a crow on your 
shoulder and an eye patch 
on your face. (How did you 
lose your eye, '70s Man? 
Was it a whiskey-related 
sledding accident? Did that 


crow peck it out?) You feel 
comfortable in turtlenecks 
and plaid and nature, but 
you're just as happy sitting 
atop a Plexiglas cube wear- 
ing only sunglasses and 
knee-high socks. You like 


blonds and a shitload of ice 
in your drink. (You'll have 
another, thanks, sweet- 
heart.) '70s Man, God bless 
you. For your musky mascu- 
linity. Your misguided con- 
fidence. Your sincerity. For 


begetting Ron Burgundy 
and the Most Interesting 
Man in the World and Ron 
Swanson and the Old Spice 
Guy. For laughing with us 
once you got the joke. 

-ANNA PEELE 


144 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 







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MANHOOD, 

A Brief History of Recent 

THE AGENTS AND ENGINES BEHIND WHO WE ARE NOW AND HOW WE GOT HERE. 

WE START, OF COURSE, WITH. . . 


John F. Kennedy, handsome, arrogant, 
ambitious, egotistical, highly capable, and 
capricious, takes the presidential oath of 
office. Roger Maris breaks Babe Ruth's 
single-season home-run record. Former 
fighter pilot John Glenn goes further and 
farther than any American before him, 
circling the earth in a capsule the size of 
a commercial washing machine. Johnny 
Carson, a vaguely young, safely middle- 
aged man, takes over The Tonight Show. 
James Bond bests Dr. No. JFK stares down 
the Soviets in Cuba. (Thirteen months 
later, he is murdered. Men everywhere 
weep. Little boys watch.) LBJ moves into 
the White House, pissing in the bushes to 
assert his territorial imperative. Cassius 
Clay, imperial and imperious, beats Sonny 
Liston, becomes heavArweight champion, 
renames himself Muhammad Ali, and re- 
fuses to fight in a war he doesn’t believe in. 
Luke Jackson eats fifty hard-boiled eggs. 
Martin Luther King Jr., graceful and brave, 
murdered. Bobby Kennedy murdered. 
Neil Armstrong takes one small step. 
Alexander Portnoy masturbates into calf’s 
liver. In a largely pointless but uncompli- 
cated effort, Evel Knievel sets a world re- 
cord by jumping over nineteen cars, call- 
ing himself afterward “the last gladiator 
of a new Rome.” Thomas Eagleton goes 
to a shrink, somehow becomes less of a 
man. David Bowie appears as the gender- 
dysphoric Ziggy Stardust, ultimately 
a more culturally resonant figure than 
Bowie himself. The Godfather premieres, 
a father and three sons. All four of them 
end up being assholes, except maybe 
the Godfather himself, who dies while 
raising tomatoes. Bobby Riggs taunts 
Billie Jean King and loses to her in the 
“Battle of the Sexes.” Bob Woodward and 
Carl Bernstein, the world’s most extraor- 
dinary desk jockeys, take down Richard 
Nixon, thus ending the theater of the 


imperial presidency. Klutzy former Big Ten 
football player Gerald Ford takes over. The 
fall of Saigon: America, first-time loser. 
Bruce Jenner wins gold. Rocky runs the 
stairs. Jimmy Carter becomes president, 
delivers a televised address in his sweater. 
(People seem to care.) Tony Manero gets 
down. AIvy Singer makes Annie Hall 
laugh. Harvey Milk is assassinated in his 
office. Real loss. Roman Polanski skips 
town after sleeping with a thirteen-year- 
old, never to return to America. No real 
loss. Ted Kramer, workaholic ad exec and 
onetime crappy father, decides he wants to 
take care of his son. Darth Vader is slowly 
revealed as another kind of crappy father. 
Ronald Reagan defeats Carter, celebrates 
the release of the Iranian hostages on his 
first day in office. (The theater of the im- 
perial presidency is reborn.) The Miracle 
on Ice, Raging Bull. John Rambo throws 
a rock at a helicopter. Michael Jackson 
moonwalks. Sally Ride crashes the boys’ 
club. The Cosby Show debuts. America 
has a new dad. (More on him later.) Rock 
Hudson announces he has AIDS. (He dies.) 
The same year, Mel Gibson, a walking hand 
grenade, is named Peop/e magazine’s first- 
ever Sexiest Man Alive. Mike Tyson sweeps 
through a legion of handpicked club fighters 
in one year to become heavyweight cham- 
pion of the world. Bill Fucking Buckner. 
Gary Hart gets caught, loses. Michael 
Dukakis takes a ride in a tank. George H.W. 
Bush, kinder and gentler, becomes pres- 
ident. Howard Stern becomes king of all 
media. Homer J. Simpson settles in. Magic 
Johnson announces he is HIV-positive. (He 
does not die.) Clarence Thomas is accused 
of sexual harassment, is confirmed to the 
Supreme Court anyway. Norman Schwarz- 
kopf and Colin Powell reignite our appe- 
tite for war. Carson retires, giving way to a 
theater of bickering rival aspirants— the ear- 
nest, eager-to -please fella and the tirelessly 


ironic wiseass. (America chooses sides.) 
Bill Clinton gets caught, wins. Michael 
Jordan leads the Bulls to a third consecu- 
tive national championship. He weeps and 
then, naturally, becomes a middling minor 
league baseball player. Tyson bites the top 
off Evander Holyfield ’s ear and spits it out. 
Viagra receives FDA approval. Clinton is 
impeached. Clinton survives. Fight Club 
premieres. Lance Armstrong wins the Tour 
de France. Tony Soprano goes to a shrink, 
remains very much a man. Bush v. Gore. 
(The loser wins.) On a sunny Tuesday in 
New York City, the FDN Y runs toward two 
burning buildings. Rudy Giuliani, Ameri- 
ca’s Mayor. Jack Bauer saves his first day. 
Tom Brady wins his first Super Bowl. Elon 
Musk sets his sights on Mars. George W. 
Bush, Mission Accomplished. (Although, 
of course, not.) Brokeback Mountain. Mark 
McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and PEDs— base- 
ball survives. Robert Downey Jr. becomes 
Iron Man— he survived. Barack Obama 
makes the world seem blazingly new for 
a minute, and then the Great Recession 
falls on working Americans like a wet circus 
tent. Sully Sullenberger lands a plane on 
the Hudson. Captain Phillips outlasts the 
pirates. Bernie Madoff is convicted. LeBron 
James outgrows his roots. Armstrong 
admits to doping. LeBron goes back to his 
roots. Brady wins his fourth Super Bowl. 
Brady is suspended for cheating. Brian 
Williams loses his anchor chair. Bill Cosby, 
unmasked. Jon Stewart goes out on a high. 
Gay marriage, legalized. Caitlin Jenner 
introduces herself to the world. Think of 
her all those years, in the prison of a male 
body, winning, and with everyone watch- 
ing, surviving. All this, and more. 

-TOM CHIARELLA 


TURN THE PAGE FOR A PHOTOGRAPHIC 
ANTHOLOGY OF THE LIVING MEN (AND WOMAN) 
WHO HAVE MOST OBSESSED THIS MAGAZINE. 


150 ESQUIRE -OCTOBER 2015 


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@b 

Shazam this 
photo to 
read about 
A. J. Jacobs's 
unforgettable 
encounter 
with Clooney. 







George Clooney 

PHOTOGRAPH BY SAM JONES, LOS ANGELES, 2004 


He might be the best celebrity storyteller in twenty-first-century 
America. If you interview George Clooney, you barely have to do 
a thing. Whatever the topic, the man has a story. You might ask 
how tall he is. He'll say five-foot-eleven— and then tell you about 
the time Donald Trump called him a homunculus. 

"I saw Donald Trump on Larry King, and he was saying, 

'Clooney is a very short guy. I mean, he's a tiny guy ... I don't 
want to knock the guy, but he's very small.' I met Donald Trump 
once ... I guess I looked about three-foot-five sitting at the table." 

Ask Clooney about Scientology and he'll tell you about the time 
he filled out a Dianetics questionnaire using his buddy's name and 
address— and gave all the worst answers about drug addiction 
and alcoholism. You might get to hear the one about the Coen 
brothers and the sex pillow. Or the one about the sunglasses and 
the penis and Pat Boone's camera. Or the funeral and the stripper. 

Are Clooney's stories true? I'd wager about 85 percent true. 
Does he use them as a shield against getting too intimate? 

Yes. But who cares? There aren't a lot of raconteurs like him 
around anymore. It's an old-fashioned word, raconteur. 

And he's a bit of an old-fashioned celebrity. A movie star with 
brains and charm and not too many shadows. And inevitably 
a little shorter than you think. —A. J. JACOBS 




/ 





Esquire Legends 


No great man is merely great. He is also 
flawed in innumerable ways. We’ve written 
about men— their greatness and their weak- 
nesses— for as long as there has been an 
Esquire. Often it’s because there is something 
about them we strive to emulate. Other times 
it’s because they changed the world or some 
part of it. On occasion we’ve become a little 
obsessed (see KENNEDY, JOHN E). Some- 
times the duration of a person’s influence 
has compelled us to revisit him time and 
again. (Woody Allen, for instance, was first 
on Esquire’s cover in 1964. He’s been on 
five additional covers and has also been a 
regular subject of stories, most recently 
in 2013. Fifty years in Esquire.) 

After a thousand issues, we asked our- 
selves which of the (living) men we’ve 
covered stand out for having not just inter- 
ested us but ajfected us. We settled on elev- 
en and then added one extra human. 

The man to the left has appeared on more 
covers than anyone else here, closely followed 
by Clinton, W. J.; Allen, W; and Ali, M. None 
of them are close to perfect, but that’s why 
we are probably not done with any of them. 


153 


Robert 

)owneyJr. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY 
GREG WILLIAMS, 

20TH CENTURY FOX LOT, 
LOS ANGELES, 2007 


It's so easy to imagine 
this world without Robert 
Downey Jr. He was all but 
dead for the six long years 
he spent in cuffs, rehab, or 
prison. He was addicted to 
black-tar heroin, which back 
then he preferred to working. 

"It's like I've got a shotgun 
in my mouth," he told a judge 
in 1999, "with my finger on 
the trigger, and I like the taste 
of the gunmetal." 

He did a yearlong bit in a 
California state pen— and 
then he eventually got clean. 
Mel Gibson paid to get him 
bonded for The Singing 
Detective in 2003, which was 
followed by a long string of 
small jobs. He got married 
again. Work was steady. He 
was still a fluid, fearless ac- 
tor, with more range, more 
depth, more honesty as a 
grown man. But when Esquire 
put him on the March 2007 
cover, absolutely nobody 
thought of Robert Downey Jr. 
as a box-office star, much less 
an action hero. 

Seven billion bucks' 
worth of movie tickets later, 
Downey's a multifranchise 
megastar at fifty years old, 
with a three-year-old son 
and a one-year-old daughter. 
He proved that any swing- 
ing dick can hit bottom and 
stick, and every one of us can 
make it back. —SCOTT RAAB 


Elon Musk 

PHOTOGRAPH BY 
DAN WINTERS, 
SPACEX HO, 
LOS ANGELES, 2012 


A leading light of a Silicon 
Valley seed fund told me 
recently that kids who 
come to him with dreams 
of changing the world with 
squiggles of code don't 
want to be Steve Jobs any- 
more, or even Mark Zucker- 
berg. They want to be Elon 
Musk. Never mind that 
Zuckerberg's ambition of 
"connecting everyone in the 
world" is more attainable 
than Musk's ambition of 
dying on Mars. Never mind 
that Musk's rocket ships 
blow up and his Tesla proves 
he's absorbed the lessons of 
Jobs but not of Henry Ford. 
Never mind that he can be 
singularly unpleasant. We 
now look to our tech titans 
for what we used to find in 
our artists, and Musk is one 
of the few among them who 
is actually making some- 
thing and whose dreams ex- 
tend into the physical world. 
How many more rocket 
ships does he have to blow 
up on the way to making 
his— and our— dreams come 
true? It matters no more 
than how many canvases 
Picasso went through on his 
way to Guernica. Elon Musk 
dies on Mars and he's the 
greatest performance artist 
since Jesus. —TOM JUNOD 


Bill 

Murray 

PHOTOGRAPH BY 
JAKE CHESSUM, 
NEW YORK CITY, 
2004 


Since God's very existence 
must be taken, if at all, entire- 
ly on faith, we are given Bill 
Murray to love and love us 
back. I don't claim that he's Je- 
sus— more than one poor soul 
has spoken of encountering a 
churlish Murray, not that Christ 
didn't suffer blue days, too. 
Murray's more akin to Santa 
Claus, whom he played on 
our cover in 1998, if Santa had 
grown up in blue-collar 
Chicago as one of nine kids. 

Truth is, Santa doesn't need 
us. Murray does, and he needs 
us more than once a year. He 
doesn't merely walk among 
us— he insists. He may or may 
not sneak up on folks, reveal 
himself, and whisper, "No one 
will ever believe you," but he 
does pop up at bachelor par- 
ties and karaoke joints, some- 
times in foreign countries. 
When he's goofing on a golf 
course or in the Wrigley Field 
bleachers, he's not pimping 
any movie— no movie star has 
ever cared less about 
Hollywood fluff or more about 
his own freedom. In his mid- 
thirties, he walked away from 
showbiz for four years; to this 
day he has no agent, no publi- 
cist. He's out there because he 
loves the golf. And the base- 
ball. And the beer. 

He's one of us— one of the 
luckiest and best of us, an 
improv player living in the 
moment after more than forty 
years in the public eye, ever 
more beloved. To call it love 
may sound silly and shallow, 
but I've seen Murray tip when 
no one else was looking. 

Jesus would've wept. 

-SCOTT RAAB 



Shazam these 
photos to read 
Murray on 
Santa ciaus 
and Nicholson 
on himself. 


Jack Nicholson 

PHOTOGRAPH BY SAM JONES, NICHOLSON’S HOME, LOS ANGELES, 2003 


The role closest to Jack Nicholson's true persona may well be 
Melvin Udall from As Good as It Gets, the 1997 romantic comedy 
for which he won his second Oscar for best actor. (His twelve 
Oscar nominations make him the most nominated actor in his- 
tory.) He portrayed a misanthropic writer whose obsessive-com- 
pulsive disorder alienates nearly everyone. Udall wears the same 
sort of sunglasses Nicholson is well known for wearing. "Once 
you've experienced negative territory in public life," Nicholson 
told me in 2004 as he chain-smoked and sipped milky coffee at his 


house in Los Angeles, "you begin to accept the notion of shields." 

With his rose-colored shades and sarcastic sneer, his devilishly 
rubber brow, Nicholson— now seventy-eight— paved the way for 
two generations of cool guys. "I can't look into the eyes of every- 
one who wants to look into mine," he continued that day. "I can't 
emotionally cope with that kind of volume. Sunglasses are part 
of my armor." 

And for more than half a century, Nicholson has been part of 
ours. -MIKE SAGER 





Muhammad Ali 

PHOTOGRAPH BY NEIL LEIFER, 
ALTS FARM, BERRIEN 
SPRINGS, MICHIGAN, 2003 


Almost two decades ago, when Muham- 
mad Ali, shivering with palsy, made his sur- 
prise appearance in Atlanta to light the 
Olympic torch, we suddenly heard what 
a "symbol" the man had become, and 
even ludicrous speculation that he had 
"made peace" with the Olympics, having 
once thrown his gold medal into a river 
because he was angry about how things 
were for black folks back in 1960. It is 
something just short of a crime against 
history that this man has been used the 
way he has been used because he can no 
longer speak for himself. 

There simply has never been an athlete 
who has so deeply affected all levels of 
society the way he has. There simply has 
never been an American athlete whose life 
has so vividly represented the awful com- 
plications of this country's history the way 
his life has. He was a brilliant athlete, first 
and foremost, someone who rearranged 
the paradigm of his sport more than any 
other athlete while still honing his craft to 
a bright, diamond edge. (The combina- 
tion that knocked out George Foreman is 
one of the few perfect athletic moments 
you will ever see.) But he also had an in- 
nate strength, and as shrewd an eye for the 
nation's broken promises and lost oppor- 
tunities as anyone else who was pointing 
them out at that turbulent time. He orig- 
inally was named after one Cassius Mar- 
cellus Clay, the "Lion of White Hall," a Ken- 
tucky abolitionist so tough that, once, after 
being shot, he got up, wounded his assail- 
ant with a knife, and threw the man over 
an embankment into a river. That was the 
name he gave up to become Muhammad 
Ali, a measure of the roiling, unceasing tide 
of race that flows under everything in this 
country. He can no longer speak clearly, 
but we cannot let him go quietly into his- 
tory. He cannot be a muted chapter in the 
country's story. —CHARLES P. PIERCE 






Tom Brady 

PHOTOGRAPH BY MATTHIAS VRIENS -McGR ATH, NEW YORK CITY, 2008 


The ultimate survivor. Tom Brady will always win. I don't mean 
that as a compliment. I mean it in the sense that if Lucifer walked 
the earth, he would be someone very much like Tom Brady and 
he would be impossible to kill. 

A sixth-round pick in the 2000 NFL draft, Brady dispatched 
Drew Bledsoe like an aw-shucks assassin and has ducked and 
escaped brutality mostly unscathed for fourteen seasons since. 
He's won 160 regular-season games and three* Super Bowls, 
but, of course, he looked for a trivial edge in the relative air 
pressure of footballs. I'd wager he's done far worse, things per- 


haps obscured by his having been surrounded by people even 
worse than he is (hey, Aaron!). What would actually surprise you 
about Tom Brady? I could tell you whatever I wanted about Tom 
Brady, however glorious or sinister, and you would believe it. 

In that way, Tom Brady is the New England Patriots, and the 
Patriots are the National Football League, and the National Foot- 
ball League is the U.S. A.: Each iscapableof anything, and that 
includes ugliness in the name of beauty perhaps most of all. 

-CHRIS JONES 

*Does the fourth one count? 


Shazam the photo of AM to read our classic 1968 cover story, or the image of Brady for our 2008 profile. 


159 




Woody Allen 

PHOTOGRAPH BY CARL FISCHER, NEW YORK CITY, 1964 


To hear Woody Allen tell it, the moment 
he truly grasped the irreducible fact that 
he and everyone he loved was doomed, 
life itself turned down a one-way dead- 
end street. His father worked side jobs, 
including as a bookie for the Mob, and his 
mother smacked him often. He tuned 
out. He learned magic and card tricks and 
found himself at the movies, every day and 
often all day, for years. 

Out of this he created a persona, the 
nebbish, as lasting and influential as Chap- 
lin's tramp. But he wasn't a nebbish, ever; 
he was a schoolyard jock and a Brooklyn 
street hustler. Also a genius: As a teenage 
joke writer, he outearned his old man. He 
wrote for Sid Caesar. He became a bril- 
liant stand-up, so popular he'd guest-host 
for Johnny Carson. Some of his short hu- 
mor pieces, collected in four volumes, are 
as perfectly crafted as anything by his he- 
ro, S.J. Perelman. 

This is the man who became— year by 
year, movie by movie— America's great- 
est filmmaker, bar none. He bestrides fifty 

160 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


years of cinema like a colossus— a wan, de- 
pressive colossus whose work includes 
some of the best comedies ever filmed 
and many of the most ambitious Ameri- 
can movies ever made, every one a dis- 
appointment of greater or lesser severity 
to him. The entire arc of his life's journey 
has swept him fifteen miles, from Brooklyn 
to Manhattan's Upper East Side, in nearly 
eighty years. His art has taken him from 
dancing with Death to facing it square. He 
wanted more. 

He wants more still— to make The Bicy- 
cle Thief, The Seventh Seal. For this, he has 
been mocked by fans and critics who want 
more films like his "early funny ones" rather 
than his serious stuff. 

Woody Allen doesn't care. He has anoth- 
er movie to make. Same deal when Mia Far- 
row ruined his personal reputation beyond 
repair by accusing him of molesting their 
seven-year-old daughter, after Mia found 
out about his love affair with Soon-Yi: He 
had another movie to shoot. And another. 
And another. And another. —SCOTT RAAB 






Shazam this photo 
for Charles P. 


classic 


Barack 

Obama 

PHOTOGRAPH BY 
MARK MANN, 
THE WHITE 
HOUSE, 2013 


In the end, it seems, he 
knew us far better than we 
would ever know him. That 
is going to be the enduring 
mystery of Barack Obama, 
the forty-fourth president of 
the United States. In 2008, 
the country elected him in 
a wave of emotion and 
relief. It preened itself in his 
golden rhetoric. He never 
stopped reminding Amer- 
ica that its greatness and 
its goodness were both still 
within reach, with the right 
amount of effort and a pro- 
found turn of heart. Then, 
because his very presence 
in the White House created 
a new and baffling mystery 
in the great American par- 
adox of race and freedom, 
he confounded expecta- 
tions. In his first term, he 
carried himself like a lame 
duck, and was accused of 
being both too concilia- 
tory toward his political op- 
ponents and too ruthless 
toward the country's per- 
ceived enemies overseas. 
In his second, he has be- 
haved like a man fresh to 
power. He knew what the 
country was capable of, 
moment by moment, 
almost second by second, 
because he understood us 
far better than we would 
ever understand him. 
-CHARLES P. PIERCE 














LeBron 

James 

ARTWORK BY XAVIER 
VEILHAN, 2008 


We might as well say it: He 
is the most dominant player in 
the history of basketball. 
LeBron James will never be 
the most popular, like Mike, 
Shaq, or Bird. He will never 
have the elegance of Magic, 
the grace of Kareem, the back- 
to-the-basket command of Wilt 
or Russell. But at six-foot-eight 
and 250 pounds, with the skills 
of a combo guard and the 
shoulders of a fullback, he is 
unstoppable on his way to the 
basket, deadly from midrange, 
a wizard of a passer whose 
gifts exceed those of any other 
player who has ever stepped 
onto the hardwood. 
Put him one-on-one against 
any legend and he'd win— pro- 
vided fouls were being called. 
James would take the smaller 
guys to the hole. He'd step out 
on the bigs. Magic would be 
the best matchup— two guys 
who play all five positions. 
But surely James's brute force 
would win the day. 
At thirty, he's won two NBA 
championships and earned four 
MVPs. After returning to Cleve- 
land last season, he reached 
the finals against Golden State 
playing one-on-five. Yet he 
continues to dominate, even if 
he doesn't always win. 
Since entering the league as 
a teenager, James has experi- 
enced adulation and derision. 
All the while, he has come 
proper— no celebrity drama, 
no arrests, no sexual assaults 
or DUIs. And even though we 
realize every team around him 
is really just a four-man sup- 
porting cast, he never fails to 
repeat his mantra: trying my 
best to help my guys. 

What more can we ask? 

-MIKE SAGER 


Angelina Jolie 

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARC HOM, LOS ANGELES, 2007 


We loved her as a wild child, with her tattoos and vials of blood 
and feral, doomed beauty. She had the chops; nobody could 
deny that. She had force. She made James Dean look like a 
whiny little pussy. She was Young America racing her black 
car through the night, and we watched with a mixture of lu- 
rid fascination and parental concern. Then the strangest thing 
happened— she reinvented herself as a badass action hero, 
and somehow it made perfect sense that the most vulnerable 
woman in the movies could become the most invulnerable. She 


was America, after all, and the nation was at war. She was al- 
ways a hardworking actress who tried everything from detec- 
tive films to sci-fi to Kung Fu Panda. She talked about quitting 
a lot, but she never did. As she acquired clout, she used it to make 
socially engaged films. And gradually she settled down to raise 
a family and give enormous amounts of money and time to 
humanitarian causes. In a troubled time, America's most trou- 
bled daughter grew up and turned into a solid citizen. 

-JOHN H. RICHARDSON 


Shazam the photo of Jolie to read John H. Richardson's early haunting profile, or the image above for a vivid profile of James. 



THE MEN OF OUR TIME 


Bill Clinton 


PHOTOGRAPH BY PLATON, NASSAU INN, PRINCETON, NEW lERSEY, 2000 

Among political figures, only President Kennedy has appeared more often on this 
magazine’s covers. Even as Hillary takes over the stage, Bill remains 
a powerful and enlivening public force. And is likely to remain so, even into the 
administration of his third successor. We spoke with him again recently. 


On July 2 , 1964, when Lyndon Johnson turned to his aide Bill Moy- 
ers after signing the Civil Rights Act and said, “I’ve just handed 
the South to the Republicans for a generation,” Bill Clinton was 
seventeen and had already decided to run for public office, as a 
civil-rights Democrat. It was as a southerner whose moral imagi- 
nation had been awakened by the racism all around him that Clin- 
ton would shape his political career— in a canny, treacherous, and 
open rebellion against the values that prevailed in the place that 
created him. And so it would be that Clinton— the greatest polit- 
ical talent of his generation, the one his opponents feared most 
and most ardently sought to destroy— not only would learn to 
survive but would become the embodiment of American poten- 
tial in the late twentieth century. He would take those survival 
skills with him onto the world stage, which meant that he would 
have fixed principles but everything else would be negotiable. 
This approach often vexed both his opposition and his allies as 
he led the world during the first chaotic decade after the fall of 
global communism and faced the rise of global jihadism, geno- 
cide in the hearts of Europe and Africa, economic globalization, 
the realignment of Congress, the birth of the Internet, and his 
own political mortality. But by the end of his second term, when 
he appeared on the December 2000 cover of Esquire, he had the 
highest approval rating of any departing president in history. 

We recently sat down with the former president to talk about 
how the world has changed in the fifteen years since he left 
office. (For the full interview, go to esquire.com/clinton.) 

-MARK WARREN 

ESQUIRE: Mr. President, the world became a very different place 
after your presidency. Was 9/11 the pivotal point for the time in 
which we now live? What in your mind has been its effect, and 
how long will the effects of that day play out? 

BILL CLINTON: Well, let me just say a few words about the time 
I served and then the impact of 9/11. Because of the economic 
growth we had and because it was the only period where pros- 
perity was broadly shared through every sector of the Amer- 
ican economy, America was in a very strong position to try to 
take the end of the cold war and build new partnerships of all 
kinds, which I tried to do. We did have terrorist threats, many 
of which we defused and prevented from getting worse, some- 
times through skill, sometimes through luck. You gotta get lucky 
in this business, ’cause it ain’t like baseball; you don’t get credit 
for saves. You’re supposed to win 100 percent of the time, and 
it’s difficult to do. So when 9/11 happened, it was such a shock to 
us that there were a lot of short- and long-term consequences. 


We tended to believe that the right thing to do had to be some- 
thing big, because what happened to us was big. So I personally 
have always believed insufficient attention was paid to fixing lit- 
tle things. Like, there were two FBI agents, in Arizona and Min- 
nesota, who did call the FBI office and say, “We’ve got all these 
guys up here fiying airplanes and they’re not practicing taking 
off or landing; there’s something wrong here.” And it apparently 
just went into a file, and nobody did anything about it in the cen- 
tral office. I always thought more should have been done about 
immediate information sharing. 

And when I went before the 9/11 Commission, I remember tell- 
ing them, “Look, I’m gonna save you some time. I’m not interested 
in covering my backside. If you find something I did wrong, by 
all means tell it and let’s figure out what to do about it.” I’ll give 
you an example: After Oklahoma City, I issued an executive 
order that required greater cooperation between the FBI and 
the CIA, and I asked them to put a senior officer in each place 
doing that job. But because there had been a history going back 
to Watergate of the president taking a hands-off attitude toward 
the FBI, I didn’t micromanage [that effort] the way I otherwise 
would have, and they basically didn’t do very much with it. So as 
the 9/11 Commission reported, the CIA knew some things, the 
FBI knew others. The hijackers were in this country a longtime 
before this happened. Several months, anyway. So I think that 
one of the things that I worried about after 9/11 was that we were 
gonna try to find big, potentially bureaucratic, and maybe overly 
intrusive ways of dealing with this instead of identifying the 
cracks in a more nimble system. 

The president’s first national- security responsibility is to pre- 
vent big, bad things from happening. This is a big, bad thing. 
And it’s worth a lot of effort to do that, but at all costs you have 
to try to do it without compromising the future of our children 
and the character of our country, which is a free place. So we’ve 
been debating that ever since. I think that debate is healthy, just 
like I think the debate’s healthy about moving away from “three 
strikes and you’re out” and other erosions of judicial discretion, 
and ending the distinction between sentencing laws for crack 
cocaine and cocaine. I think all that’s good. So I think we may 
have overreacted a little bit after 9/11, but we were trying to keep 
big, bad things from happening. And thank God no big, bad thing 
has happened again. 

But it’s an ongoing battle. Because the things that benefit us 
about globalization also burden us with great responsibilities. 
So I see this thing going on in some form or fashion for another 


Shazam the photo at left to read Michael Paterniti's great profile of Clinton at the end of his presidency. 


165 


twenty or thirty years. And the reason that I believe on balance 
the Iranian nuclear agreement is good for the country is not be- 
cause I think that Iran is gonna turn into, you know, a “Kumbaya” 
partner, but because there are at least four other Arab states that 
have the capacity to become nuclear powers. And it costs a lot of 
money, and it’s difficult to develop, maintain, and secure a nuclear 
arsenal, and you always have a lot of loose nuclear fuel, which can 
be sold, stolen, or given away and turned into suitcase bombs. I 
felt much better when [secretary of energy] Ernie Moniz went 
over there and became part of the deal, because he had been part 
of my administration and we had worked a lot on that. I’ll never 
forget it, he came to see me— he wasn’t yet secretary of energy, 
but he was in an executive position, and I knew him and trusted 
him; he is a brilliant man— and he said, “Look, what we have to 
worry about is somebody putting a Girl Scout cookie’s worth 
of fissile material in Timothy McVeigh’s fertilizer bomb.” And 
so we tried to identify every country in the world that had that 


much, which is a lot because of biomedical research, and then go 
and tell those countries what he had found with his simulations 
and work out arrangements with each country about what to do, 
because nobody wanted that to happen. 

I consider it a major— I don’t know if achievement is the right 
word— but I think it’s a major development, given the penetra- 
tion of the Pakistani military and security forces by people that 
we knew were sympathetic to the Taliban and then became sym- 
pathetic to Al Qaeda, that to the best of our knowledge, none of 
their fissile material has ever been given away, sold, or stolen. 
And I just didn’t want five more headaches, and I didn’t think 
it was good for the people in the Middle East. So now, if this 
deal is approved, then the ball is in Iran’s court. We’ll have to 
see what they continue to do, and we’ll have to continue to re- 
spond to it. But buying ten years without an Iranian nuclear weap- 
on is a lifetime-plus in global affairs. I understand why the Ar- 
ab states are worried, I understand why Israel is worried, and 
they’re absolutely right. But I just don’t think there’s any way 
Israel would be more secure if there were four or five new nuclear 
powers in the Middle East and you had all that fissile material 
fioating around that anybody could get a hold of. 

The real dilemma for all of us over the next twenty years is 
going to be that the future is going to have way more positive 
possibilities because of our interdependence, but also continued 
opportunities for hacking, for cybersecurity problems, and 
for the spread of deadly technologies, with a lot of confused, 
undereducated, and unemployed young people in the world, and 
with a global shortage of jobs for young people, opportunities to 
do destructive things. Young people are more vulnerable to the 
siren songs of fundamentalism and the social media. And if they 


get up thinking tomorrow is going to be like yesterday, that’s 
a very bad thing. This is why I think it’s so important that the 
nation-states that are functioning work harder on shared pros- 
perity, shared opportunities, and shared security, because that’s 
the great battle here. 

You can’t make all this stuff happen without technology, without 
relatively open borders and without other people being able to use 
the same technology for more selfish and more lethal ends. And that’s 
basically where we are. 

On balance, I feel good about it because we can’t turn back the 
clock. We’re moving toward an integrated, global society. And 
I think you see the rapid progress in America on the gay-rights 
issue, and the less rapid but in a way equally moving progress 
made after the terrible killings in Charleston, South Carolina, 
thanks to a blistering four-minute speech by a direct descendant 
of Jefferson Davis. That’s moving history in the right direction. 
It’s coming together instead of tearing apart. I’m for the coming 
together. I’m against the tearing apart. 
ESQUIRE: When I say “the people who 
have defined our time,” who or what 
comes to mind? 

CLINTON: Well, for me, as ababy boomer, 
it’s the people who led the great move- 
ments to try to make America a more 
just place, a better place. The civil- 
rights movement, the women’s -rights 
movement, the gay-rights movement, 
and the environmental movement. The 
idea that the world is going to have to 
become more accepting of diversity— 
and the people who don’t agree, ISIS. 

The world is becoming more in- 
terdependent, and national borders 
look more like nets than walls. The nation-state will con- 
tinue to be very important, but there will be more and more 
and more unique, previously unforeseeable partnerships re- 
quired. Alliances by issues, hard choices. How can you make 
a deal with Iran on nuclear capacity if they’re still gonna 
sponsor Hamas and Hezbollah? How can you break down barri- 
ers between government, business, and NGOs when you should 
and keep the barriers when you shouldn’t? All these ques- 
tions are going to present problems, and the nongovernmen- 
tal movement is going to be filled with good actors that some 
nations are increasingly trying to control— China and Russia, for 
example— and also bad actors that can be very successful. You 
could argue that ISIS is the most successful NGO— it’s like the 
Gates Foundation versus ISIS, you know? They’re a nongovern- 
mental organization. 

So in the modern world, the ideas that will shape our time 
will be the intersection of science and technology, medicine and 
health and technology; the ability to eradicate poverty— we’ve 
already exceeded the poverty goals in the first Millennium 
Development Goals; the ability to identify and lend dignity and 
importance to every life, because there will be fewer people that 
need to live and die anonymously in the world; and the ability to 
find ways to cooperate against the forces that are using the same 
exact technologies and mobility and porous borders to try to gain 
a very different future. Boko Haram, Al Shabab, Ansar Dine, ISIS, 
et al. And underneath it all, in the twenty-first century we will 
be called upon, I think and I hope, to resolve the oldest dilemma 
of human society, which is “What does it mean to be a human 
being?” Our identity crisis. Which is more important, our differ- 
ences or our common humanity? itt 


“The nongovernmental movement is going 
to be filled with good actors ... and also bad 
actors that can be very successful. 
You could argue that ISIS is the most 
successful NGO— it’s like the Gates Foundation ^ 

versus ISIS, you know?” 


166 ESQUIRE -OCTOBER 2015 



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Murray, Bill 

See THE MEN OE OUR TIME. 


Music 

See Rolling Stone. 




New Journalism, Greatest, 

Least Known Practitioner of 

The exuberant and ageless John Sack was 
the only American journalist to witness 
combat in every American war from Korea 
in the early fifties to Afghanistan in 2002. 
The “embed” arrangement— which at- 
tached a journalist to a particular mili- 
tary unit— was virtually invented for Sack. 

While he was covering the Korean War 
for Stars St Stripes, his status as a correspon- 
dent ended after he stowed away overnight 
aboard an American landing ship to inter- 
view Chinese prisoners of war and was 
arrested by the American military police 
when the ship docked in Pusan, South Ko- 
rea. Facing court-martial charges, Sack 
was reassigned to a mail room in Tokyo. A 
month later, he was ordered back to Ko- 
rea as an infantryman, the Army being un- 
able to charge him with a specific violation. 

He helped create both New Journal- 
ism, utilizing the techniques of literature 
in topical reporting, and modern writing 


about war. It was in Korea that he began to 
lose faith in traditional reporting methods. 
Sack recalled covering a press conference 
in Seoul in which a government official de- 
nied rumors of an ammunition shortage. 
“I was sitting there thinking. Bullshit. Of 
course there’s an ammunition shortage. I 
know there’s an ammunition shortage.” A 
week earlier, he had been in a battle dur- 
ing which an American tank crew had run 
out of shells and was told at the ammuni- 
tion dump, “Sorry, we’re all out; we don’t 
have anymore.” 

Despite his firsthand knowledge. Sack 
was compelled to print the denial, which he 
considered a moral outrage. And so he be- 
gan a long career of seeing things for him- 
self and simply telling the truth. His hones- 
ty and brilliant writing changed j ournalism. 

Sack wrote for Esquire for more than 
forty years; he died at age seventy-four in 
2004, less than two years after writing his 
last war story from Afghanistan. 

His epic three-part series on Lieutenant 
William Galley the only soldier court-mar- 
tialed for the massacre of civilians at My 
Lai, led to him being indicted for refusing 
to turn over his reporting materials to as- 
sist in Galley’s prosecution. In defense of 
his position, he said, “I am a journalist, not 
an agent of the government.” 

But it was his 1966 masterpiece, “M,” in 
which he intimately covered the experi- 
ence of one Army platoon from basic train- 
ing to combat in Vietnam, for which he is 
best remembered. Perhaps the greatest sin- 
gle piece of war reportage ever published, 
it was also— at thirty-three thousand 
words— the longest story ever published 
in the magazine: 

Then it was that the incident happened. A 
cavalryman, seeing a sort of bunker place, a 
hut above, hole below, and hearing some voices 
inside it, toldDemirgian to throw a grenade 
in. Dermirgian hesitating, , a soldier we 


DUBIOUS 

ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS 

1981 

▼ 

THEN HE STABS THEM 
WITH KNITTING NEEDLES 
AND MAKES THEM 
INTO SOCKS 

Mass murderer Charles Manson said 
he spends his time in prison 
pulling apart socks with his teeth 
and making the yarn into dolls. 


have met before, though not by name,jumped 
from his ARC and flipped in a hand grenade 
himself It rolled through the door hitting a 
sort of earthen baffle before it exploded, and 

gasped as ten or a dozen women and 

children came shrieking out in their crin- 
kled pajamas: no blood, no apparent injuries, 

though, and got onto his carrier again, 

it continued on. The next ARC in the column, 
with Yoshioka aboard, drove up to this hovel, 
and a Negro specialist four, his black rifle in 
his hands, warily extended his head in, peer- 
ing through the darkness one or two seconds 
before he cried, '‘Oh mvsrodr 

“Whafs the matter?” said a second spe- 
cialist, a boy on whose machine gun Yosh- 
ioka was assistant. 

“They hit a little sdrl” and in his muscu- 
lar black arms theflrst specialist carried out 
a seven-year- old, long black hair and little 
earrings, staring eyes— eyes, her eyes are 
what froze themselves onto M’s memory, 
it seemed there was no white to those eyes, 
nothing but black ellipses like black gold- 
fish. The child’s nose was bleeding— there 
was a hole in the back of her skull. 

Twenty-five years later, during the first 
Gulf War, Sack was the sole journalist al- 
lowed in an armored vehicle during what 
is still described as the largest tank battle 
in history. Without Sack’s report, the world 
would never have known the true chaos of 
that battle. “G Gompany,” December 1991: 

“Watch what you’re shooting at!” Burns 
cried on the radio, for he couldn’t see the 
Iraqi. “Be careful!” Burns cried, and tata- 
ta! the Iraqi exploded in so many parts that 
a boy who was watching thought. Why are 
they shootins' that ras? “God damn it! Get 
under control! I told you to ask vermission 
flrst,” said Burns, who still couldn’t see the 
supposed rag and was practically singed as 
the rounds went by. “Explain to me: What 
the flick are you doing?” 

“I covered your back door!” the boy in 
back of Burns radioed. 

“I have told you to ask permission!” said 
Burns. “Now that is the last fuckins' time!” 

In the gloom below him sat Anderson, 
thinking. My God! We’d have eaten a rock- 
et before you’d have told him, “Fire.” Ander- 
son wanted to shout to Burns, “Do you know 
what you sounded like? A fucking blooming 
idiot, and the whole company heard you!” 
But discretion prevailed, and Anderson 
didn’t shout, and Burns didn’t grasp that a 
lot of C, tuning in, was totally appalled and 
was thinking seriously of Gizmo, the plan 
to bump him off 


168 ESQUIRE -OCTOBER 2015 


Shazam the above illustration to read "M." 


ILLUSTRATION BY JOE McKENDRY 








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Ortolan 

The forbidden delicacy of 
France, chosen by former 
French president Frangois 
Mitterrand for his final meal as 
he lay dying of cancer in 1995. 
This is what it tastes like. 

"The Last Meal " by Michael 
Paterniti, May 1998 

The bird is surprisingly soft, 
gives completely, and then 
explodes with juices— liver, 
kidneys, lungs. Chestnut, corn, 
salt— all mix in an extraordi- 
nary current, the same warm, 
comforting flood as finely 
evolved consomme. 

Yes, quidbits of meat and 
organs, the succulent, 
tiny strands of flesh between 
the ribs and tail. I put inside 
myself the last flowered bit of 
air and Armagnac in its lungs, 
the body of rainwater and 
berries. In there, too, is the 
ocean and Africa and the dip 
and plunge in a high wind. 

And the heart that bursts 
between my teeth. 

It takes time. Tm forced to 
chew and chew again and 
again, for what seems like three 
days. And what happens after 
chewing for this long— as the 
mouth full of taste buds and 
glands does its work— is that I 
fall into a trance. I don't taste 
anything anymore, cease to ex- 
ist as anything but taste itself. 

And that's where I want to 
stay— but then can't because 
the sweetness of the bird is 
turning slightly bitter and the 
bones have announced them- 
selves. When I think about 
forcing them down my throat, 
a wave of nausea passes 
through me. And that's 
when, with great difficulty, 

I swallow everything. 


PRESIDENTS 

THE THIRTEEN MEN WHO HAVE HELPED BEND OUR 
HISTORY-A BIT OR A LOT-AS OBSERVED FROM HERE 


FDR 

"Life Because of Father " by James 
Roosevelt [son of and former staff 
assistant to FDR], November 1957 

[President Gabriel Terra of Uruguay] . . . said 
that, while our secret-service men would be 
riding in the front seat of the old-fashioned 
touring car and his cavalry would be riding 
beside it, “There’s a little angle behind the 
rear seat where an assassin can take a pot- 
shot at whoever is riding there.” 

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” chuckled fa- 
ther to relax him, “we’ll put Jimmy in the 
jump seat directly in front of you and if 
anyone gets hit, it’ll be Jimmy.” 


TRUMAN 

"Harry Truman Chuckles Dryly," 
by Robert Alan Aurthur, 

September 1971 

The grief- stricken Mr. Truman holds back 
the news of Charlie Ross from daughter 
Margaret who that night is to sing her de- 
but concert in Washington. After a rest- 
less night Mr. Truman rises at dawn to 
scan the painful headlines, then hurriedly 
turns the newspaper to the Paul Hume re- 
view of Margaret’s appearance. 

“She is flat a good deal of the time. . . .” 
Hume wrote. She “cannot sing with any- 
thing approaching professional fin- 
ish.” . . . What Harry S. Truman did was 
snatch up a pen and pad of White House 
notepaper and address the following to Mr. 
Hume: “I never met you, but if I do you’ll 
need a new nose and plenty of beef-steak 
and perhaps a supporter below.” 


EISENHOWER 

"The Use and Abuse of Billy Graham," 
by Marshall Frady, April 1979 

Eisenhower lay desperately ill in a hospi- 
tal suite at Walter Reed and Graham was 
summoned to his bedside. . . . 


Eisenhower said to [Graham], his eyes 
watering, “Billy, give those old doughboys 
in Vietnam a message from me. Tell them 
there’s an old soldier back here at Walter 
Reed who’s pulling for them and wishes 
he could be there with them.” But then, his 
eyes welling over, his voice faltering. . . he 
implored Graham, “How can I know I’m 
going to heaven? How can I be sure, Billy, 
absolutely sure, that my sins are forgiv- 
en?” Graham reached out and held Eisen- 
hower’s chill hand firmly while “I told 
him his whole past was forgiven.” . . . And 
with that, says Graham, “he looked up at 
me with the tears still in his eyes but with 
that famous grin and said, ‘Thank you, Billy. 
I’m ready.’” 


JFK 

"Kennedy Without Tears," 
by Tom Wicker, June 1964 

When Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson 
of Canada arrived at Hyannis Port in the 
Spring of 1963, his reputation as a base- 
ball expert had preceded him. The resi- 
dent White House baseball nut was Dave 
Powers, an Irishman of jovial mien. . . . Af- 
ter a chilly Cape Cod dinner, Pearson fol- 
lowed Kennedy into seclusion, only to And 
it shattered by a summons to Powers. 

“Dave,” the President said, “test him out.” 

Whereupon Powers put the Prime Min- 
ister through an exhaustive baseball cate- 
chism, while the President rocked silent- 
ly in his rocking chair Back and forth 

flowed the batting averages, managers’ 
names. World Series statistics . . . until fi- 
nally it was Dave Powers, not Mike Pear- 
son, who tripped on some southpaw’s 1926 
earned run average. 

“He’ll do,” Kennedy said then, with some 
satisfaction. After which he and Pearson 
hit it off famously and jointly equipped 
Canada with nuclear warheads. 


170 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


Shazam the tinted box at left to read "The Last Meal," by Michael Paterniti. 




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LBJ 

^The President's Heart/' 
by Anonymous, August 1964 

Johnson has always thrived on stress. He 
has chosen the stressful as a way of life. 
He enjoys it If Johnson were now sud- 
denly eased out of the Presidency his re- 
action to the enforced idleness would be 
serious. It would be, for him, the ultimate, 
intolerable stress. 


NIXON 

"Nixon in Heaven," 
by Garry Wills, July 1994 

I remember a story Father John Cro- 
nin told me of Nixon’s vice-presidential 
days, when Cronin was a secret advis- 


©o 

Shazam this illustration to read "The Use and Abuse of Billy Graham," by Marshall Frady. 


er . . . to Nixon: “One day, Dick sent me to 
his home in the suburbs to get some pa- 
pers. . . . When I knocked, Pat opened the 
door and said . . . ‘He can’t get back in by 
sending a priest!’ 

“I went back and said, ‘What did you get 
me into?’ He said, ‘Oh, I didn’t think she’d 
say anything to you. We were just having a 
little problem now.’ But I noticed, then, that 
Nixon was not going home at night. He kept 
a hotel room in the District for nights when 
he had to stay late at the Senate, or for oth- 
er reasons. And he was just living there.” 


FORD 

"What I've Learned," interviewed 
by Wil S. Hylton, January 2003 

Deep Throat? I have no idea. That’s the ^ 
least of my worries. ^ 

no 

CARTER ^ 

" Eyes on the Prize," “ 

by Gregory Jaynes, October 1995 ^ 

On January 4, 1981, Carter taught his last ° 

Sunday Bible class in Washington. ... ^ 

. . . [He] found the defeat “incomprehen- 3 

sible.” Not only had he been rejected, as he - 


172 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 



wrote in one memoir or another, but the 
country “had chosen a horse determined 
to run back as fast as possible in the op- 
posite direction.” He got back to Plains to 
find that his peanut-related concerns had 
tanked. He was a million dollars in debt. 
And he had a thoroughly citified daugh- 
ter, Amy, twelve, who was having such a 
miserable time of the transition that she 
was outside, up in a pecan tree, and she 
wouldn’t come down for supper. 


REAGAN 

^^Dutch Reagan, All-American/' 
by Joel Kotkin and Paul Grabowicz, 
August 1980 

The movie people didn’t change him, they 


just captured his essence, polished it, and 
presented it over and over on the screen. 
“He still plays it today,” [his brother] Neil 
says, smiling. 


GEORGE H.W. BUSH 

"What I've Learned/' interviewed by 

A. J. Jacobs, January 2011 

I never said. Now that you’re president, 
here’s what you’ve gotta do— no advice 
like that. He had his own people around 
him, good people. I had my chance. 


CLINTON 

"Big Lick Linksmanship in Clintonville," 
by Alex Shoumatoff, February 1993 

[Lobbyist Paul] Berry had roomed with 
Bill in the late Seventies, when Bill was 
running for attorney general. “. . . He lived 
on bananas and peanut-butter,” Berry 
said. “He would wipe his finger in the 
peanut-butter jar, so I had to get my own 
jar and hide it, and he’d steal every clean 
shirt I had ” 


GEORGE W. BUSH 

"Mrs. Hughes Takes Her Leave," 

by Ron Suskind, July 2002 

“A lot of it has to do with his mother,” [Laura 
Bush] says. . . . She describes how the death 
of his younger sister, Robin, at the age of 
three, prompted seven-year-old George to 
want to replace her, to be his mother’s best 
friend, to ease her pain. He became Barba- 
ra’s boy, often passing up baseball with the 
gang to stay with her, lore having it that he 
would stand at the front door in Midland 
and say. Can’t right now, fellas, I have to 
play with my mom. 


OBAMA 

"The Cynic and Senator Obama," 
by Charles P. Pierce, June 2008 

He left an impression as a stubborn, stiff- 
necked grinder with a gift for changing 
tactics on the fiy. His very first meeting 
[as a community organizer] at Altgeld 
Gardens did not go well. Pastor Love 
recalled. An arrogant city bureaucrat 
got everybody’s back up. Half the people 
wanted to walk out, and the other half 
wanted to deck the guy. “Barack wouldn’t 
quit,” Love said. “He pulled us off to the 
side and he said, ‘Well, we messed that 
up. We didn’t see that coming. We need 
to strategize right now about how to deal 
with stuff like this and hold people ac- 
countable so this kind of thing doesn’t 
happen again.’ ” 


a 


Questions that 
we've asked in 
headlines: Answered 


What's good in Paris? (1935) 

Le Jardin du Petit Palais. 


Do animals think? (1938) 

Yes. 


What shall we do about 
football? (1940) 

Still working on it. 


Are we becoming 
paranoid? (1940) No. 


And how are you? (1940) 

Eh. 


Are husbands helpless? (1947) 

No. 


What is the most beautiful 
body in the world? (1949) 

Lake Superior. 


Whither the beard? (1955) 

Hither. 


Do you know too much? (1962) 

No. 


Why do the heathens 
rage? (1963) 

Do they? 


Can a sixty-two-year-old 
writer with a history of heart 
trouble find fulfillment 
running with the bulls in the 
streets of Pamplona? (1970) 
Probably not, no. 


Want to know what college 
men are like today? (1977) 

No. 


If you had two days 
with Halle Berry, what would 
you do? (2007) 

Frisbee golf. Forage for 
mushrooms. Experimental 
theater. A little volunteer work- 
soup kitchen or something. 

DJ class. Share a very large 
steak. Compare our dads. 
Architecture tour. Recount our 
worst dates ever! You first! 

Just be silly. 


What is a man? (2009) 

This again? Christ. 


173 




Rbcc 

AND RACISM HAVE BEEN A SUBJECT AND AT TIMES A FEATURE OF THIS MAGAZINE, 
AS WELL AS THE SOURCE OF SOME OF ITS MOST MEMORABLE WRITING 


AN AERIAL VIEW OF NEW HARLEM will disclose a radi- 
cal landscape: vast, cleared ranges of space with fifteen peaks ris- 
ing into the sky. These fifteen widely separated conical structures 
will house a half million people. . . . Where we are physically is en- 
meshed with our deepest consciousness of self There is no evading 
architecture, no meaningful denial of our position. You can build 
to defend the endurance of man, to protect his existence, to illumi- 
nate it. But you cannot build for these purposes merely in spasmodic 
response to past and present crises, for then cri- 
ses, like the poor, will be with us always. If man 
is to have not only a future but a destiny, it must 
be consciously and deliberately designed. 

From “Instant Slum Clearance/’ by June 
Meyer, an endorsement of the plan of futurist 
designer R. Buckminster Fuller for “a total so- 
lution to an American dilemma” (April 1965). 

That article appeared less than a year af- 
ter the Harlem race riots of 1964, and it en- 
I . visions a future in which most of the capital 
M of black America is razed and redesigned as 
I ^ parkland and cloverleaf highways, while the 
people of Harlem, who are hardly mentioned 
in this strident manifesto, are reengineered 
into tidy two-bedroom apartments in steel- 
and-glass super-public-housing Christmas trees towering a hun- 
dred stories over the remains of their old neighborhood in Man- 
hattan. In that the piece advocates for the social and physical 
destruction of the most famous black neighborhood in the coun- 
try by eminent domain, it is a provocation and a complete outrage. 
And both of those words— provocation, outrage— capture much 
of the writing on race and the constellation of issues around race 
that have appeared in Esquire from the start. If you didn’t know 
who the putative author, June Meyer, was— and Esquire didn’t 
bother to tell anyone— you wouldn’t have known that she was 
better known in the world as the Harlem poet and activist June 
Jordan, who actually was codesigner with Fuller of “Skyrise for 
Harlem,” a project thoroughly of its time, a time when the condi- 
tions of black America were so terrible that utopian space hous- 
ing was seen as the only way out for America. It was exactly what 


you could expect to find in Esquire in that the idea and the story 
were both whimsical and deadly serious. Esquire was straining 
toward the future, and in the pre- civil-rights era, in hundreds of 
stories on race, could fairly be described as one part racist— Esky 
was always finding himself in a boiling pot being stirred by some- 
body with a bone through his nose— and two parts enlightened, 
publishing Langston Hughes’s most famous poem, “Let America 
Be America Again,” July 1936: 

Let America be America again. 

Let it be the dream it used to be. 

Let it be the pioneer on the plain 
Seeking a home where he himself is free. 
(America was never America to me.) 

And “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” by James 
Baldwin, July 1960: 

When we reach the end of this long block, 
we find ourselves on wide, filthy, hostile Fifth 
Avenue, facing that project which hangs over 
the avenue like a monument to the folly, and 
the cowardice, of good intentions. All along the 
block, for anyone who knows it, are immense 
human gaps, like craters. 

These gaps are not created merely by 
those who have moved away, inevitably into 
some other ghetto; or by those who have risen, almost always into 
a greater capacity for self-loathing and self-delusion; or yet by those 
who, by whatever means— War II, the Korean War, a policeman’s 
gun or billy, a gang war, a brawl, madness, an overdose of heroin, 
or, simply, unnatural exhaustion— are dead. I am talking about 
those who are left, and I am talking principally about the young. 
What are they doing? 

And the great Richard AVright’s short story “Big, Black, Good 
Man,” November 1957: 

''Good evening.” The black giant’s voice filled the small ojfice. 

Olaf sat up slowly, not to answer but to look at this brooding 
black vision: it towered darkly some six and a half feet into the 
air, almost touching the ceiling, and its skin was so black that it 
had a bluish tint. And the sheer bulk of the man! His chest bulged 
like a barrel; his rocklike and humped shoulders hinted of moun- 



174 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 



HART 

SCHAFFNER 

MARX 


MADE IN THE USA 






tain ridges; the stomach ballooned like a threatening stone; and the legs were like tele- 
phone poles. The big black cloud of a man now lumbered into the office, bending to get 
its buffalolike head under the doorframe, then advanced slowly upon OlafHe was like 
a stormy sky descending. 

“You got a room?'' the big black man asked. 

These are just a few among so many others on the wound of race in America that 
refuses to heal. It was the so many others that often got the magazine attacked, as it 
was by a newspaper publisher from Alabama in 1964, for its “bright, clever, enter- 
taining, illogical, radical left-wing writing.” 

Orsen B. Spivey of the Geneva County Reaper continued (in an editorial that was 
reprinted in full in the March 1964 issue): “Blithely they continue to slam ‘bigotry in 
the South’ in every issue, usually by means of Hitler’s ‘big-lie’ technique, assuming 
that integration of the races and Federal control of every facet of society is virtually an 
accomplished fact and only a batch of Southern Slobs, in their pitiful ignorance, are 
holding out against the establishment of a universal utopia in which everyone is color- 
blind except Martin Luther King and Esquire, Inc.” 

Through the explosion of civil rights and assassinations and race riots, through 
the “era of big government is over,” through the whole process of lurching toward 
racial equality, through the election of a black president, Esquire has looked steadily 
at race and culture and especially at the stubborn intersection of race and poverty. 

From the jaundiced backside of civil rights came David Bradley’s “Black and Amer- 
ican, 1982,” May 1982: 

I am a black. . . . Somehow I had gotten the idea that I had within me attributes and 
talents that could produce many colorful effects, and that the measure of my success 
as a person would be the extent to which I could bring my internal pigments together 
to create a multicolored personality that would be visible to the world outside. Per- 
haps because I was raised on Sunday school ditties and Bible verses, I thought I had a 
little light and that I ought to let it shine before men. The notion was naive, silly, and 
quixotic. I have given it up. 

And just as June Meyer’s utopian vision of Harlem was born of a riot that started 
when a police officer shot ahoy, so too was the story of Michael Brown Sr., “ ‘I Should 
Have Been There to Protect Him . . .’: The Intimate Story of Michael Brown Sr. and 
the Agony of the Black Father in America,” by John H. Richardson, January/Feb- 
ruary 2015: 

It is Thanksgiving at Mike Brown's house, three days after a grand jury declined to 
bring charges against the policeman who killed his son and his city exploded in riots. 
His wife, Calvina, and her mother and various daughters and sisters and cousins bus- 
tle around the kitchen preparing the feast. The men gather downstairs in the man cave, 
watching the Eagles school the Cowboys. Because they're Americans and this is the 
day Americans consecrate to gratitude, the Brown family tries to stick to easy topics— 
food, sports, music, children, absent relatives— everythingbut the nightmare that has 
changed their lives forever. Soon they will take their places around the table. Soon they 
will bow their heads and pray. Soon they will declare the things that still make them, 
despite everything, thankful. 

Brown's house is an ordinary ranch in a pleasant, safe neighborhood a few miles from 
where his son was killed, completely average except for one thing— down in the man cave 
the walls are decorated with photos of Brown's dead son, a tapestry of his dead son, a 
photo of a mural dedicated to his dead son. Hanging on the corner of the TV is a black 
necktie with his dead son's face peeking out at the very bottom, like a bit of sun under 
a long black cloud. Brown leans against a pillow bearing his dead son's face. Mike- 
Mike, they called him, as ifsayinghis name once weren't enough to express their love. . . . 

. . . Tonight, everyone wrote on the tablecloth except for Brown. But what would he 
write? What can he possibly be thankful for at a time like this? 

He thinks for a moment. Some answers in this world are easy— for Cal, obviously. 
His mother-in-law, who made her. And being able to get up every morningto fight for 
Mike-Mike. 

The other answers are all in the future, in the ideal America that never quite comes, 
in the endless struggle that will deliver us— as it is delivering Brown— to grace. 

-MARK WARREN 



Racy 

And “risque” were among the complaints 
brought against Esquire by the U. S. post- 
master general, as noted by Supreme Court 
justice William O. Douglas in a landmark 
1946 ruling against the postmaster’s deci- 
sion to revoke Esquire’s permit for second- 
class postage. The postmaster had claimed 
the magazine did not “contribute to the 
public good and the public welfare.” In a 
unanimous decision, the court ruled the 
postmaster was not empowered “to pre- 
scribe standards for the literature” or “to 
determine whether the contents of the pe- 
riodical meet some standard of the public 
good.” The decision effectively recognized 
pinups and salacious humor— and, really, 
the objectification of women— as socially 
acceptable. It is widely believed to have 
led to the rise of even racier publications 
than this one. 



Reynolds, Burt 

when Jack Nicholson backed out of his nude 
cover for Esquire's October 1972 issue at 
the last minute, a story on male impotence 
received top billing. We just needed the most 
masculine man in America to volunteer to 
be the face of it, and there was only one man 


176 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 




for the job. Fortunately, he said yes. 

I was working on a picture called White 
Lightningwhen I was approached by a guy 
from Esquire who said they wanted to do 
this cover with me. I got the joke right away 
and said yes. We went into the back of this 
photography shop in town, and they had it 
all lit up. It was summer in Arkansas, where 
it’s about 112 degrees inside, so at least it 
wasn’t in the cold! We had a few laughs— 
and I think I had a few drinks. I liked the 
photographer, Dan Wynn, a lot. I think the 
best thing you can do when your mascu- 
linity is being brought up so constantly 
is just to have fun with it. And fortunately, 
the public really reacted well to it. Johnny 
Carson and I were very close, and he was al- 
ways kidding me about it. But I always had 
fun with him. I mean, every place that I went 
on, that kind of a show or a talk show, or any 
publicity that I was doing for a picture, they 
brought it up. It was fun. I’d worked with 
Jon Voight on Deliverance that year, and 
he and I have remained very close friends. 
We always have a million laughs. And he’s 
somebody that kids me about all that stuff I 
keep telling him that they would have asked 
him to do the cover, but he wasn’t mascu- 
line enough! 




Rooster 

Paul Sedaris, younger brother of writer 
David Sedaris, ''You Can’t Kill the Rooster,” 


June 1998: 

Asked how he came up with the name, 
[Paul] says only, “Certain motherfuckers 
think they can fuck with my shit, but you 
can’t kill the Rooster. You might can fuck 
him up sometimes, but, bitch, nobody kills 
the motherfucking Rooster. You know 
what I’m saying?” 

Sedaris wrote about Paul and other mem- 
bers of his family in a dozen essays for the 
magazine in the late 1990s and beyond, in- 
cluding "Me Talk Pretty One Day” (March 
1999) and the unforgettable "Big Boy” 
(November 1999). 




AS ESQUIRE'S sexual au- 
thority, I took the occa- 
sion of our 1,000th issue 
to dive deeply into the 
annals (which I keep, 
leather-bound, by my 
bed) and present our 
stance on sex, both cur- 
rent and from behind. 

We have never been 
afraid to trudge through 
the sexual trenches. A 
report on the nightclubs 
of occupied Germany 
would have pleased Hitler 
tremendously: horny Ger- 
man women trying, with 
their crotches, "to split 
the Allies. . . . [and] spread 
pure Nazi ideologies, 
which remain strong." 
Nice try, frauleins, but 
neinl I think it goes with- 
out saying that Esquire re- 
mains proudly anti-Nazi- 
slut. Additionally, the 
amount of reportage from 
deep inside the group-sex 
world and New Jersey as- 
sures me that Esquire is 


open-minded about open 
marriages. Esquire is pro- 
foot-job as well, although 
an excerpt from a French- 
man's World War II mem- 
oir describing his affair 
with an insatiable foot- 
jerker is our first and last 
word on the subject. 

As expected, signifi- 
cant space has been 
devoted to blowjobs. A 
David Foster Wallace sto- 
ry about a wife who wants 
to give great head so 
much that she buys a dil- 
do and practices (I think 
we showed great 
restraint by not making 
this the subject of every 
article after that) would 
have you believe that 
Esquire has an unshak- 
able belief in the merits 
of fellatio. But a few years 
later, we published "The 
Demise of the Blowjob: 
And the Rise of Gunnilin- 
gus." The latter might be 
gaining, sure, but I thinka 


blowjob is still a thing you 
can get at most places. 

We're intrigued by af- 
fairs, fictional or other- 
wise, or in the case of Phil- 
ip Roth's novel Deception, 
about an affair had by a 
fictitious Philip Roth, both 
and neither. We've asked 
cheating men why men 
cheat (because it's fun 
and they like it) and cheat- 
ing women why women 
cheat (because it's fun 
and they like it), and we've 
proposed that in order to 
fuck someone forever, 
one has to fight with 
someone forever. And 
after a blissful cruise 
through my twelve years 
of sex advice (which went 
down like a fifty-year-old 
port, by the way), I stand 
by everything, particularly 
the stuff about herpes. (I 
just think you guys would 
be more comfortable on 
your island, that's all.) 

Upon closing the 
annals and wiping them 
off, I'd say we're in good 
shape. Nothing we can't 
explain away. Our stance 
on sex is that we're still 
basically for it, so keep 
your questions coming. 
(But no more about 
masturbation curing 
diseases, please. It still 
doesn't.) 

—STACEY WOODS 


178 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


Shazam the illustration of Sedaris to read "You Can't Kill the Rooster." 


ILLUSTRATIONS: SEDARIS: JOE McKENDRY; SEX: JOHN CUNEO 


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THE ESQUIRE 
SHAVING HALL OF FAME 



Jessica Simpson Virna Lisi 

(face. May 2008) (face, March 1965) 








Memphis Belle: legendary World War II 
B-17 bomber, named after an Esquire Petty 
Girl illustration painted on fuselage. 


Playboy: started in 1953 
by Esquire copywriter Hugh 
Hefner, who left the 
magazine after being denied 
a five-dollar-a-week raise. 


The ombudsman: 

Newspapers first urged 
to take on role of public 
editor in a March 1967 
column in Esquire. 


The magazine on TV. 

■network 


A-Rod-Jeter feud: 

First public sniping 
appeared in a 2001 
Esquire profile of 
A-Rod, in which he 
said, "[Jeter] never 
had to lead. He can 
just go and play and 
have fun." 


SPAWNED, 

WHAT ESQUIRE HAS 


A SELECTIVE INVENTORY OF 
THINGS THE MAGAZINE HAS 
BEGOTTEN OVER THE COURSE 
OF 999 ISSUES 


The ESQ watch: 

Designed by watchmaker 
Movado since 1992. Swiss 
timing, Esquire style. 


MOVIES: 

Breakfast at Tiffany's 

Based on Truman Capote's 
story in Esquire (November 
1958). Unintended conse- 
quences: George Peppard's 
career; The A-Team. 

Dr, Strangelove 
Writer Terry Southern and 
director Stanley Kubrick 
met when Esquire assigned 
Southern to profile Kubrick. 

Apocalypse Now 
Inspired by Michael Herr's 
Vietnam stories. 
Bonnie and Clyde 
Screenplay written by 
former Esquire staffers 
Robert Benton and 
David Newman. 
Urban Cowboy 
Adapted from a 1980 
feature story. Unintended 
consequence: Rise 
of line dancing. 

Apple Inc: 

See JOBS, 
STEVE. 


GQ; started as a fashion-focused 
spin-off of Esquire in 1957. 


Esquire and Jefferson's 
Manhattan Barrel Finished 
Cocktail: Premixed 
manhattan in handsome 
bottle. Pour, garnish, enjoy. 


The 

Internet: 

Sure, 
why not. 


180 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


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men's toiletries. Today, there are over 200, with the number increasing 
rapidly. American males spent close to fifty million smackers last year, 
on behalf of better grooming. Why? Because the field is becoming 
specialized." esquire, October 1945 


"Manufacturers are certainly doing their best to make the daily grist of mowing the 
map an easier and quicker performance. Blade users will welcome one of those 
little box sharpeners which will condition any double edged blade for at least a 
couple hundred perfect shaves." esquire, October wss 


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Max Braun dramatically 
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when he introduces his 
revolutionary shaver foil 
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with the finest and shortest 
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The effective yet hazardous straight razor 
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South Boston. By the end of World War I, 
some 3.5 million razors and 32 million 
blades were put into military hands. 


Q^aot 

Alexander the Great 
found that hirsute 
soldiers were at a 
disadvantage due 
to excessive enemy 
beard grabbing and 
insisted his troops 
maintain clean- 
shaven faces. 




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1985 

The lubricating strip 
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when the Atra Plus is 
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on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, preceding the trend of men 
taking an active interest in their everyday grooming rituals. The 
company would eventually open more than 150 stores nationwide. 


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1971 

Gillette introduces 
the TracII, its closest 
shave to date and the 
first twin-bladed razor. 
Over the following 
decades, Gillette would 
debut three- and even 
five-bladed razors, 
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Smart gentlemen about town are collecting various grooming requisites as much 
for the clever containers as for the contents... A favorite with the rugged type is the 
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@b 


Shazam the cover below to read Gay Talese's 
poignant portrait of Joe DiMaggio. 


Sports 

Among the giant topics that have attracted the best writers, the 
one— more than power or war or adventure or sex— that has most 
inspired their language, their punctuation, and their amazement. 

Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yesr 
by Tom Woife, March 1965: 

Instead of going into the curves and just sliding and holding on for 
dear life like the other drivers, Junior developed the technique of 
throwing himself into a slide about seventy-five feet before the 
curve by cocking the wheel to the left slightly and gunning it, us- 
ing the slide, not the brake, to slow down, so that he could pick up 
speed again halfway through the curve and come out of it like a 
shot. This was known as his “power slide,” and— yes! of course!— 
every good old boy in North Carolina started saying Junior John- 
son had learned that stunt doing those goddamned about-faces run- 
ning away from the Alcohol Tax agents. 


What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now? ^ 
by Richard Ben Cramer, June 1986: 

He’s out every day, out early and out loud. You 
might spot him at a coffee bar where the guides 
breakfast, quizzing them on their catches and 
telling them what he thinks of fishing here late- 
ly, which is, “IT’S HORSESHIT.” Or you might 
notice him in a crowded but quiet tackle shop, 
poking at a reel that he’s seen before, opining that 
it’s not been sold because “THE PRICE IS TOO 
DAMN HIGH,” after which Ted advises his friend. 



the proprietor, across the room: ‘TOU MIGHT AS WELL QUIT 
USING THAT HAIR DYE. YOU’RE GOING BALD ANYWAY.” 

*'The House That Thurman Munson Built,'' 
by Michael Paterniti, September 1999: 

I give you Thurman Munson in the eighth inning of a meaning- 
less baseball game, in a half-empty stadium in a bad Yankee year 
during a fourteen- season Yankee drought, and Thurman Munson 
is running, arms pumping, busting his way from second to third 
like he’s taking Omaha Beach, sliding down in a cloud of luminous, 
Saharan dust, then up on two feet, clapping his hands, turtlinghis 
head once around, spitting diamonds of saliva: Safe. 

"Belmont: Queen of the Tracks," by W.C. Heinz, June 1953: 

It is six- thirty and the haze of morning is like a grey gauze around 
the dark green stables and the lighter green trees. A race track, you 
see, wakes up between five and six o’clock. It wakes up with the 
sound of the cock crowing somewhere among the stables and a dog 
barking and horses ever5Fwhere starting to get restless in their stalls. 

"The Silent Season of a Hero," by Gay Talese, July 1966: 

One night in a supper club a woman who had been drinking ap- 
proached [Joe DiMaggio’s] table, and when he did not ask her to 
join him, she snapped: 

“All right, I guess I’m not Marilyn Monroe.” 

He ignored her remark, but when she repeated it, he replied, 
barely controlling his anger, “No— I wish you were, but you’re not.” 

"Gorgeous Dan," by John Irving, April 1973: 

Out of normal dress, in wrestling tights, [Dan] Gable no longer 
looks small. His wrists resemble ankles, his forearms approach 
the size of the normal human calf, his upper arms are respectable 
thighs. He has no hips, no ass . . . Gable’s body is pure function; it 
looks built to perform. It is no more pretty than an axhead. It is no 
more elaborate than a hammer. 

"The Man Who Never Was," by Mike Sager, May 2009: 

Once, during halftime at a home game, Todd [Marinovich] retrieved 
a premade rig out of his locker and went to the bathroom to shoot 
up. Sitting on the toilet, half listening to the chalk talk, he slammed i 
the heroin. As the team was leaving the locker room for the second 
half, he struggled with the screen in his glass crack pipe— he wasn’t 
getting a good hit. Then the pipe broke, and he lacerated his left 
thumb. By the time he got out onto the field, his thumb wrapped 
in a towel, the game had already started. 


"Ain't I Pretty?" by Charles P. Pierce, 
September 2000: 

It’s simply good to be Warren Sapp— even when 
it’s December in Green Bay, and the game is tight, 
and your breath comes in tortured clouds— be- 
cause you can have these moments in which ev- 
er5Fthing comes together in a great wave like some- 
thing from a deep and mystic sea, and it pops out 
of your eyes and your face, and out the tips of your 
fingers, and it dangles from the braids in your hair. 

Joy, that is. 


185 



Ever since Esquire set out in 
the fall of 1933 to inspire readers 
to give “a little care and thought 
and study to the selection of 
clothes,” the editors have 
devoted part of every issue to 
helping men understand the 
prevailing tastes and best 
practices of the times. Much has 
changed over the years. Much 
has not. And over the following 
pages, we use images from past 
issues of the magazine to show 
how the ways we dress now have 
roots in how we dressed then. 

PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEWART SHINING 





ESa.PG.l86 



THE BLAZER 

THEN (1959): Full- or half- canvas and 
often cut boxy, it was one rung down from the 
suit and almost always paired with a tie. 
NOW: Thanks to advances in fabric and 
construction, the modern iteration is the 
fulcrum of high-low dressing. 
Unlined and unstructured, it’s best worn 
close to the body. With a tie, maybe. 

Two-button wool-and-cashmere jacket 
($2,695), cotton shirt ($445), and virgin-wool 
trousers ($845) by Giorgio Armani; calfskin 
derbies ($1,055) by A. Testoni; steel Carrera 
Calibre 6 Heritage automatic watch ($3,150) by 
TAG Heuer; socks ($32) by Bresciani. 



THE CHALK-STRIPE SUIT 

T H E N ( 1 9 6 1 ) : The pTofessional man’s 
daily suit of armor, full-canvassed, heavy 
as hell, and built to last. 

N o w : The professional man’s increasingly 
optional suit of armor. Half-canvassed, 
light as a feather, close-fitting, and with no 
visible means of support. 

Double-breasted wool suit ($8,795), cotton 
shirt ($860), and silk tie ($300) by Kiton; calfskin 
derbies ($1,140) by Santoni. 



THE TIE 


THEN (1960): An 

indispensable emblem 
of membership in the 
professional classes and 
the sine qua non of 
respectable adulthood. 
NOW: Abadgeof 
classic taste and 


elegance— but only 
when you feel like it. 


Two-button wool 
jacket ($970), cotton- 
poplin shirt ($350), and 
silk-blend tie ($130) 
by Calvin Klein Collection; 
steel Carrera Calibre 6 
Heritage automatic watch 
($3,150) by TAGHeuer. 


189 ^ 


V 







ig wear ana 
i tknhhj wWt- 

rumisfi®rvc»t 


THE TUXEDO 


then(i 955):A TigoEous Uniform that one diverged from only at one’s own risk. Experts 
played with color, cloth lapels, and the fixings, but no one messed with the tie. 


N o w : A rediscovered pleasure, rendered more comfortable by advances in textile technology. 
Exnerts still nlav with the details, though onlv amateurs switch out the bow tie for a straight one. 


^JVo exciting fabrics that i 

von easygoing 




UTWHf 






8"S •*!'* 

«M»* I JS* 

iiss S 

IjlSSift'J 

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QUIRE 


BER 2015 


THE CAMEL 
COAT 

THEN (1949): A 

singularly American 
favorite, first seen in the 
early part of the twenti- 
eth century as an apres- 
sport cover-up. Big, all- 
enveloping, and warm. 
NOW: Still a great 
option to shut out the 
cold, though it’s cut 
shorter and trimmer 


than its antecedents. 


Double-breasted wool coat 
($4,400), double-breasted 
wool jacket ($2,700), 
cotton shirt ($640), and 
wool trousers ($860) by 
Prada; calfskin derbies 
($850) by Pal Zileri; 
cashmere hat ($465) by 
Sup erDuper Hats. 




THE LEATHER 
JACKET 
AND JEANS 


THEN (1958): The 

twin hallmarks of hell- 
raisers and troubled 
young souls. 

NOW: Aglobal symbol 
of luxurious weekend 
nonconformity that 
is, of course, thoroughly 
conformist. 

Leather jacket ($4,495), 
cotton sweater ($375), and 
denim jeans ($595) by Dolce 
St Gabbana; leather boots 
($975) by Esquivel; steel 
Khaki Field watch ($575) by 
Hamilton; socks (pack of 
three; $17) by Gold Toe. 







TWEED (COATS, 
SUITS, ETAL.) 


THEN ( 1936 ): THo Standard foT 
“sportswear,” tweed derived from thick 
and scratchy wool plaids first developed in 
Scotland as a form of camouflage. 

NOW: Still a recurring staple of old- 
school charm, it’s often holdly reimagined 
and mixed up in eye-popping ways. 

Double-breasted wool coat ($5,900), two-button 
cashmere jacket ($5,950), cashmere turtleneck ($l,15i 
and wool- and- cashmere trousers ($1,500) by 
Ermenegildo Zegna Couture; suede derbies ($595) 
by Ermenegildo Zegna. 



GROOMING BY CLAUDIA LAKE, 
HAIR BY THOM PRIANO, BOTH 
FOR CONTACT. SET DESIGN 
BY KERRY REARDON FOR RAY 
BROWN PRO. 


THE PARKA 


THEN (1999): 

Technical outerwear as 
fashion was the story in 
men’s wear in the 1990s. 

NOW: Technical 
everything as fashion is 
the story in men’s wear 
in the 2010s. 

Coated-nylon ripstop 
jacket ($595) by RLX 
Ralph Lauren; cotton 
sweater ($245), cotton 
shirt ($135), and waxed- 
cotton pants ($185) by Polo 
Ralph Lauren; nubuck- 
leather-and-rubber boots 
($150) by Sorel. 






T 


Talese, Gay 

WRITER, JOURNALIST, 

ESQUIRE LEGEND I 83 

NEW YORK CITY 

INTERVIEWED BY CAL FUSSMAN, 
JULY 15, 2015 



> Still alive, and writing as slow as ever. 

> My attention to detail came from watch- 
ing my father put together a suit. Stitch- 
ing, then measuring, two fittings, three 

fittings The idea of doing things 

well . . . taking time . . . getting it right. It’s 
all part of my journalism. It’s writing like 
a prideful tailor. 

> Every person you interview becomes a 
kind of mentor of the moment. 

> My daughter was born because of the 
Peter O’Toole assignment. Esquire sent 
me to London in 1963 to interview Peter. 

He asked me, “Do you have any children?” 

I said, “No, I can’t afford children.” He ^ 
said, “Why not?” I told him I didn’t have 
enough money. He said, ‘Tou don’t sound 
like you’re very much of a risk taker.” I 

thought. Wake up. Gay. You’re hearing something now. “So, where’s 
your wife?” he asked. I told him she was a young editor at Ran- 
dom House. “Why don’t you have her come over? You can stay in 
my house.” So she flew over and we stayed in his house. We con- 
ceived our daughter in Peter O’Toole’s guest room. She’s fifty- one 
years old now. 

> The magic of America is in its nonfiction characters that can 
well defy fiction because they’re such unbelievable stories. 

> If you're a child in your parents’ store, you learn manners. You 
respect the customer. You learn to be an observer. 

> I always had to dress for my father’s approval. I was the only 
son of the town’s major tailor, and the son had to not discredit 
him by looking like a slob. That’s one pressure I had as a kid. I was 
like a signboard that said BUY your suit here. 

> Writing about Sinatra was not my idea. Sinatra was Esquire’s 


idea. I didn’t want to do it. He was too famous, and I wanted to 
write about people in whom I could discover something. 

> What made a difference in the Sinatra piece, I think, is as I got 
older and older, the piece got younger and younger. 

> Foolish people try to imitate Tom Wolfe. It’s embarrassing. 

> Ordinary food is wonderful to me. I don’t want extraordinary 
food. I want a plain meal in a place where I can listen to people who 
are interesting tell me about themselves. That’s four courses for me. 

> Eat too much and your suits suffer. 

> What makes a good marriage? A language of intimacy that you 
share. You intuit a dialogue that was never expressed. 

> Freedom is doing what you want and doing it for as long as you 
want. 

> What does it all mean? It comes down to this: How well did 
you do your work? How did you treat people? 



Trump, Donald 


As described by Nora 
Ephron in "Famous 
First Words" June 1989 
Here is what interests 
me about Donald 
Trump: He wants to be 
famous. He wants 
people to talk about 


him. He wants people 
to notice him. He wants 
people to write 
about him. He wants 
people to ask him for 
autographs and 
recognize him and 
invade his privacy. . . . 

Look how happy he is 
in his Trumphood; look 


how merrily he floats 
in his Trumpdom; look 
how brightly he wal- 
lows in his Trumpness. 


As described by Trump 
himself in "What It 
Feels Like to Be Trump," 
August 2004 
When I look at some 


of the things that have 
happened in govern- 
ment, I can't believe 
it. Countries that we're 
protecting are screw- 
ing us on oil prices. It's 
unthinkable. I wouldn't 
stand for it. How would I 
handle that? That's what 
it feels like to be me. 



196 ESQUIRE -OCTOBER 2015 


©o 


Shazam the illustration above to read Talese's classic profile "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." 


ILLUSTRATION BY RALPH STEADMAN 



w 



IF NOT THE PRINCIPAL SUBJECT OF ESQUIRE’S BEST 
WRITING OVER ITS HISTORY, WAR IS CERTAINLY AMONG 
THE MOST PERSISTENT 


IN THAT, THE magazine has reflected 
its nation. In the nearly seventy-four years 
since Pearl Harbor, the United States has 
been engaged in major wars— not counting 
the little ones, like Somalia and Bosnia and 
Grenada and Panama— for nearly half of 
them. We are a warring nation. Over scores 
of stories, the nature of the magazine’s own 
fixation with war evolved in the way jour- 
nalism itself evolved over those decades, 
moving from soft commentary and remi- 
niscence and occasional propaganda to vivid 
reporting and visceral narratives, the kind 
the magazine practically invented. 


Crew at Pearl Harbor/' by 
Lieutenant J. K. Taussig Jr., World 
Warn, March 1943 

I could see three men lying prone with 
terrible burns. The man on the top bunk 
was recognizable only because of his phy- 



“Oh raj' God 
-we hit 
a little girl.” 


'I'he Irue skifvorM . 

I’HJin I bri l>i>t loVietiiaiii- 


The cover of the October 1966 issue, which 
included John Sack's account of the 
infantry company that he followed from training 
through its first tour of combat. 


sique and a small shock of blond hair which 
hadn’t been burned. He was smoking a cig- 
arette held between burned fingers through 
which the bone showed. He leaned over and 
I spoke to him. He said that he figured he 
was pretty badly burned, but that the fellow 
in the bunk under him was worse off, so he 
had told the doctor to treat his buddy first. 


"Hell Sucks," by Michael Herr, 
the Vietnam War, August 1968 

“You mean you don’t have to be here? And 
you’re herel” But they are glad you’re here, 
really very grateful. “Hey, Esquire! Hey, 
you want a story, man? Write this: I’m up 
there on 881, this was May, I’m up there 
walkin’ the ridgeline an’ this Zip jumps 
up smack into me, lays this AK-47 fuckin’ 
right into me, only he’s so surprised I got 
my whole clip off ’fore he knew how to 
thank me for it. Grease one.” After twenty 
kilometers of this, in spite of the roiling 
dark sky ahead, we could see the smoke 
coming up from the far side of the river, 
from the Citadel of Hue. 


"A Rumor of Resistance," by Philip 
Caputo, the Soviet War in Afghanistan, 
December 1980 

It was obvious that these Russian pilots 
weren’t afraid of anything the mujahedin 
could do to them. And with good reason. 
The guerrilla beside me was aiming his 
rifie at the aircraft, and I thought, Jesus 
Christ, don’t shoot that damn thing and 
draw their fire, when I saw that his gun 
was a breech-loading Martini-Henry. 
Stamped on the receiver were the initials 
V.R.— “Victoria Regina”— and the date of 
manufacture, 1878. 


"The Making of the Twenty- First- 
Century Soldier, Part Three," 
by Colby Buzzell, the Iraq War, 
November 2005 

I then directed my M2 40 machine gun to- 
ward the tower and pulled the trigger com- 
pletely back and didn’t let go until I was 
completely out of rounds. Links and brass 
shells spitting out of the right side of my 
weapon, making a huge mess all over. It was 
fuckingbeautiful. (Almost burned the bar- 
rel.) ... As I reloaded the 240 with another 
belt of 7.62, 1 was thinking to myself, Jesus 
Christ, I can’t believe I’m actually shoot- 
ing at a holy place of worship. I thought we 
weren’t allowed to do this kind of thing. 

Fuck it. 


"The Things That Carried Him," by 
Chris Jones, the Iraq War, May 2008 

The last time the platoon saw Sergeant 
Montgomery was later that morning, at 
first light. It was Wednesday, May 23. They 
all came out of their barracks to see the 
helicopters land. . . . They took hold of the 
poles of the stretcher, three on each side, 
with their friend from Indiana between 
them, zipped up inside a black bag tucked 
under a green Army blanket, and they car- 
ried him into one of the Black Hawks, and 
they watched them lift off into the dawn 
and dust, and they saluted then, saluted 
the start of one journey and the end of an- 
other, holding their salutes all the while as 
the birds fiew away, until they were gone 
over the horizon. 


"The Long Walk," by C. J. Chivers, 
the War in Afghanistan, August 2009 

Lieutenant Smith watched. Closer they 
came, closer, and closer still, until the first 
man was perhaps six feet away from the 
nearest American prone on the ground, 
who switched the selector lever on his ri- 
fie from safe to semiautomatic, readying 
it to fire. The lever made a tiny metal- on- 
metal noise, a click. 

The lead insurgent stopped. 

He lowered his head Other lasers, 

from other soldiers, were locked on each 
man visible in the column behind. The 
point man seemed undecided, unaware 
of the green dot above his brow. He had 
heard something, but what? 

“Fire,” Lieutenant Smith said. “Fire, fire, 
fire, fire.” 


TURN THE PAGE TO READ MARK WARREN'S 
STRIKING PROFILE OF C. J. CHIVERS AT WAR. 


Shazam the cover above to read a story from one of our more current conflicts, Chris Jones's unforgettable "The Things That Carried Him." 


197 




THE FORCES OF LIBYAN PRESIDENT MUAMMAR 

Qaddafi had been firing high- explosive ordnance into the city of 
Misurata for weeks— they’d been shooting tank rounds and they’d 
been firing rockets. Barrage after barrage. And lots of mortars. 
And among the 120mm mortars they had been firing were Span- 
ish-made rounds that were a clustering munition that had nev- 
er been seen in combat before. This was a serious problem, be- 
cause we now know that the Spaniards had sold the mortars to 
the Qaddafi government just as Spain was preparing to join the 
international convention that banned them. 

We know this because of the work of C. J. Chivers of The New 


York Times, also a frequent contributor to Esquire, whose exper- 
tise in ballistics and battlefield tactics— and nearly unprecedent- 
ed experience reporting from war zones— has made him the most 
important war correspondent of his time. Chivers suspected that 
Qaddafi was using the Spanish mortars, and it was when he went 
to prove it that a NATO jet on a bombing run tried to kill him. 

By that April 2011, when Libya was collapsing into civil war, 
Chivers himself had been at war for ten years. He’d been in Af- 
ghanistan in November 2001, just after the bombingbegan, as he’d 
been in Iraq in March 2003, when the bombingbegan there— as 
he’d also been in lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 


PHOTOGRAPH BY CHANG W. LEE/ 
THE NEW YORK T/MES/REDUX 




Chivers with 
Kurdish 
Peshmerga 
fighters in 
northeastern 
Iraq, March 
2003 . 


ced combatCTort'$r of hisgeneration— suddenly decided to stub 

kmki. - 


b^tandmostexpj 


and as he had been in every theater since, too many deployments 
for him to even remember, amounting to years away from his 
home, his wife, and his five small children, four boys and a girl. 

The Times hired Chivers at age thirty-four in 1999 to cover 
war. That was the handshake, he says. A former Marine officer, 
he might know how to handle himself in a war zone, the paper 
figured. What the Times could not have known was that Chiv- 
ers would develop a brand of journalism unique in the world for, 
among other things, its study of the weapons we use to kill one an- 
other. After reporting on a firelight— whether he was in Iraq, Af- 
ghanistan, South Ossetia, Libya, or Syria— he’d look for shell cas- 


ings and ordnance fragments. If he was embedded with American 
soldiers or Marines, he’d ask them if he could look through what 
they had found for an hour or so— “finger fucking,” he’d call it— 
and ask his photographer to take pictures of ammunition stamps 
and serial numbers. Over time and in this way he would reveal a 
vast world of small- arms trade and secret trafficking that no oth- 
er journalist had known existed before. 

And what no one could have known was that the experience 


BY MARK WARREN 


OCT. 2015 


PG. 199 




Chivers has had at war would be a mirror for the experience of 
the United States over the same period. Only for him, that expe- 
rience— and its damaging effects— has been far more personal. 

In the center of Misurata, where the mortars were falling, Chiv- 
ers found pieces of Qaddafi’s banned mortar rounds, but he didn’t 
know exactly when they’d been produced or how they’d been im- 
ported to Libya. The best way to find out would be to try to find the 
positions from which government troops had fired them. He had 
examined many of the Qaddafi positions as they changed hands 
inside the city— along Tripoli Street, the same street where his 
friends the photographers Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington 
had been killed by mortar fire three weeks before— but hadn’t yet 
been able to find any identifying documents or shipping crates 
that would tell him what he needed to know. 

So on the day after the siege lifted, he walked the hills sur- 
rounding the city. He was methodical, drawing on his own expe- 
rience in the infantry to decide where he would put the mortar 
pits. Then he slowly walked in an ever- expanding square looking 
for his evidence. He found some old military equipment, perhaps 
from an antiair training site used by Qaddafi’s military. But judg- 
ing from the way it was arranged, it wasn’t related to the latest 
fighting. He kept walking the hill as his square grew wider still. 

Chivers and his translator, Hadi, were in friendly rebel-held 
territory, so feeling relaxed, he had removed his helmet before 
leaving his van. This was a rare thing for Chivers to do an 5 where, 
but especially in this shitty war, as he called it, as there had been 
a lot of terrible things falling out of the sky and two of his friends 
had just been killed. Chivers is disciplined about when and why 
he won’t wear his gear. Besides his desire to live, he also feels eth- 
ically bound to protect himself because being wounded meant 
that, as he says, a doctor or a bunch of nurses and an ambulance 
driver were all helping you instead of helping someone else. It is a 
rule whenyou’re covering a war zone, you try to not go into the ca- 
sualty stream and further clog it up. 

So even as Chivers took his helmet off, he observed himself 
doing so. Ten years into this job— a job in which he would vacate 
his feelings about virtually everything and become, as he puts it, 
“a somewhat robotic observational machine,” because if I start 
thinking about myself and how Fm feeling, then how can I do my 
job?rm not interested in how I feel. Who gives a fuck how I feel?— 



he felt certain as he removed his helmet and deliberately placed 
it on the back bench of his van that this is not the day that I die. 
What I am doing here is not dangerous. 

Another rule is that if you’re with someone who wants to leave, 
then you leave. If you’re with another j ournalist and you’re getting 
shot at, and he feels in his gut that it’s time to get out of there, you 
go. In Syria in 2013, he and photographer Bryan Denton were driv- 
ingto the rebel front one day just as the government dropped artil- 
lery along the route. “It was a very scary run,” Denton remembers. 
“Basically, they’d cut the Aleppo -Damascus highway. There was a 
regime position about five hundred meters away, which is a terrible 
spot to be in because you’re far enough away that they can use ar- 
tillery, but close enough that they can still use tanks and small arms 
and heavy machine guns. It’s one of the only times in my career that 
I’ve been just too afraid to work. And Chris was calm and we were 
just getting our stuff done, and I remember at one point he asked me, 

“Are you good to go?” And I was like, “Yeah, man, I need to get out 
of here. I can’t work. I’m too spun.” Chivers abruptly stopped what 
he was doing, Denton says. No more questions asked. And they left. 

He is not one to leave a dangerous place easily. On September 11, 
2001, he was working in downtown Manhattan, a few blocks from 
the World Trade Center, for the Times’s metro desk. He had put on 
his one tie and headed out to cover primary Election Day when his 
pager started going crazy. He ran toward the burning buildings on- 
ly to just miss being killed at 9:59 by the falling South Tower, and 
again at 10:28 by the falling North Tower. He remained on the pile, 
reporting for the paper, for the next twelve days. 

A few weeks later, he was in Uzbekistan en route to Afghani- 
stan. That would begin fourteen years of reporting on war, of be- 
ing in an almost constant state of almost getting killed, during 
which time he wrote hundreds of stories from dozens of places. 

And his skill as a journalist became directly proportional to his 
powers of self-denial. “The work isn’t all that good,” he says. “It’s 
just a few stories.” He is known among other journalists for this 
self-negation, but even more so for his remaining unruffled in 
even terrifying situations. Like Denton, those who have gone to 
war with him tell stories of Chivers keeping them calm, often by 
narrating the incoming fire. He knows ranges and probabilities, 
has a good instinct for whether their position is at risk of being 
overrun, and on occasion offers basic tutorials. The Times pho- 
tographer Tyler Hicks, a frequent reporting partner, recalls Chiv- 
ers saving him from being hurt badly as he was standing behind 
a gunner: “RPG back-blast, Tyler! Get back, dude!” Or, as Denton 
says, “He’d call, ‘That’s a missile, not a rocket— remember, a mis- 
sile is powered throughout flight, a rocket is powered at launch.’ ” 

Chivers has spent more time in the field with Hicks than any- 
one else. Hicks remembers a night in Afghanistan when a short ^ 
patrol turned into something much longer. They were usual- 2 
ly meticulous in their preparation for joining a patrol, but on ^ 
this night they found themselves caught out in the open and ill ? 
equipped. The patrol had gone south, and they were out for the ^ 

night— without food, water, or gear, sleeping in the dirt. “A freez- ° 

ing rain started. Absolute misery. Chris and I actually had to hold ^ 

each other to try to keep warm that night,” Hicks says. “Those ^ 

times are just as bad as being in a firelight. Hungry all the time. £ 

Thirsty all the time. Headaches from dehydration, and the dirt g 
gets into absolutely everything. Grit in your teeth. In your eyes. S 
In your food. In your water.” The fuller story of that harrowing 2 
patrol and an ambush and the company’s hectic scramble back 2 


200 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 




He started weaving, running in one direction and then zag- 
ging in another, a 20- degree zag. His head was heavy and his 
brain was swelling from a concussion. But Hadi ran right to the 
car and jumped in. As Chivers was still zagging, Hadi pulled up 
alongside, door open, yelling, “Get in, get in, get in!” Chivers was 
thinking. It’s a lot easier to hit a car than a man, and I don’t know 
if I wanna be in the car. But there was no getting Hadi out, so he 
dove into the backseat and Hadi floored it. 

The rebel guards at a checkpoint 150 yards down the road were 
surprised to suddenly see this little van screaming out of the huge 
mushroom cloud. The guys manning the checkpoint were wide- 
eyed and talking really fast, Chivers recalls. One of them pointed 
excitedly at Chivers and said, “Bigboom mister! You still alive?” 


Shazam the photo above to read Chivers's Esquire story about his 
experience on the pile. Opposite, in Afghanistan in 2011. 

to base would become a classic piece of Chivers reporting in Es- 
quire (“The Long Walk,” August 2009). 

Anytime Chivers embeds with a unit, before actually going into 
the held, he gathers all the soldiers to introduce himself and to de- 
scribe the work that he intends to do. “It was one of the smartest 
things he could have done,” Hicks says. “Because when someone 
would get hurt or killed, and we’d be trying to do our job, some- 
times people around us would get upset because they didn’t ful- 
ly grasp what we are doing there.” 

We’ll be out there with you, going on the same patrols, making 
the same movements, and taking the same risks, Chivers will say. 
The main difference is that we are not armed. And if something 
happens, our job is different from yours. Our job is not to influence 
what happens or to turn your attention away from your work, but 
to document what is happening. 

Chivers searched the hillside outside Misurata for a while but 
found nothing. He remembers tapping his watch, thinking. I’ve got- 
ta get back and call in. The afternoon was a bust. He said to Hadi, 
Fuck it. It’s not here. Let’s go. He turned to leave; he could see his car. 
And a few seconds later, the sky just roared. A sound, at first, more 
than a flash. I knew this sound because I had been around a lot of air 
strikes. But he had never before been directly beneath an air strike. 
He had never been the target of an air strike. This one sounded like a 
bomb— aflve-hundred-pounder— dropping down an elevator shaft, 
with Chivers at the bottom. There was no time to react or even say 
anything. His mind formed the simple thought: Azr strike. Dead. 

The bomb landed in front of Chivers and Hadi, and the shock 
wave lifted them and threw them backward. Chivers landed hard 
on his chest, cutting his arms and face, and he remembers be- 
ing surprised still to be thinking thoughts, remembers thinking: 
These things throw up a lot of debris. Okay, you survived that, but 
you don’t wanna get killed by a car bumper hurling down on you 
from a hundred feet. So the instant he hit the ground, he rolled 
and scanned the sky overhead, a quick scan, but saw nothing. 

Hadi seemed to be unharmed, and they both got to their feet. 
Neither could hear what the other was saying, but Chivers was 
yelling. He knew the architecture of air strikes, and he knew that 
attack aircraft often move in pairs. He also knew that the targets 
who were still moving on the ground after a strike were con- 
sidered to be especially annoying targets. The pilots call them 
“squirters”— the people who survive the first blast and then try 
to escape. And there’s the practice of “plinking squirters,” sort 
of a clean-up process. And that’s what Chivers was yelling: We 
have to get the fuck out of here. Now. 


AT HOME IN RHODE ISLAND, CHIVERS KEEPS A 

piece of the bomb that almost killed him on the wall of the office 
off the garage where he writes. It was a GBU-12, stamped with 
FOR USE ON MK82. That incident w US extremefyv aluuble, he sscys. 

An aircraft, a pilot, put a guided munition very near to me on a 
piece of ground where I was standing that was unquestionably out 
of the Qaddafi forces’ hands, and then proceeded to brief the strike 
publicly as if it was a valid strike. They said things that were not true. 
They may have believed them. Either way, it’s a problem, right? It 
shows that they don’t know what they’re bombingin many instanc- 
es, and they convince themselves that they do, which is an incredibly 
dangerous use of lethal power. And it just was extremely useful to see 
that and consider other things they may be saying to you on one story 
or another. Because there’s no question to me about what happened. 

Chivers laughs. I had some proximity to the event. 

He survived that bombing because of topography and geom- 
etry. Dumb luck, really. Since September 11, he says, he’s often 
thought the difference between living and dying came down to 
where your feet are. 

And today, that’s home. Here he’s Chris, and knows you’re a 
stranger if you call him C. J. He made captain in the Marines, 
but it was when he made lieutenant that he started having oth- 
er Marines to account for, and evening paperwork to do. Signing 
“Christopher John Chivers” dozens of times a night was a chore. 
So he became C. J. to the Marines, and when he got out and went 
to Columbia Journalism School after service in the first Gulf War, 
it stuck for his byline, too. 

The Chivers house is full of children and noise and life. It is where 
he has spent virtually all of his time since returning from war and 
where he does most of his writing. He intensely dislikes writing 
about himself, and likes talking about himself even less. He’d much 
rather talk about “murdering fish,” as he puts it. He’s got an open 
fishingboat: twenty-six feet, fiberglass, forty-five hundred pounds, 
nine- and- a-half-foot beam. Deep V, he says. It takes seas well. 

No belowdecks. Head’s a bucket— his and hers. There’s no bed or 
bunk or galley or cabin. It’s just, you know, whatever the weather is, 
you’re in it. I’m at my best when I’m sort ofhyperstimulated mentally. 
Or I am most like myself let’s put it that way. I feel at my most calm 
if I’m out on a boat in the middle of the night in bad weather and fog 
with the kids aboard, many, many miles out, you know, working the 
boat and trying to solve the puzzle of the fish, and then trying to get 
the boat in with no visibility and this blackness and mist and fog and 
the possibility of collision with the various tugs and barges that are 
navigating the same waters. A lot of people would not want anything 
to do with that. But I am never more blissfully satisfied and calm. 


201 


He and his wife, Suzanne, bought the place when he was as- 
signed to the Times’s Moscow bureau from 2004 to 2008, a post- 
ing that allowed him to take his family along and gave him per- 
fect time-zone proximity to the wars. 

The wars, of course, have been traumatic for his family. When 
he was reporting in Afghanistan that first time, just as the wars of 
this century were starting, he was away for four months and got 
home late in January 2002. At the time, he had one child. Jack, 
then almost two. His second son, Mickey, was born five weeks 
after he returned. He would be back in conflict a couple months 
later, spending that summer working in Israel. 

To prepare for the coming Iraq War, which would start the fol- 
lowing March, Chivers left home for the Middle East again that 
November and would be gone for more than six months, miss- 
ing Christmas for the second time in a row and marking his sin- 
gle longest stretch in a war. A whole family is happening. And I 
am not really part of it, as I should have been. Right? 

His Iraq War nearly ended before it started. All the borders 
were closed and he almost couldn’t get into the country. The 
Times had several people in Baghdad, but no one in the north, in 
Kurdistan, which is where he needed to go. But while waiting in 
London he got lucky, accidentally running into an important fixer. 

This guy happened to be passing through London. I arranged to 
meet him, and I told him I wanted to go to Kurdistan and that I in- 
tended to stay. He read his newspaper the whole time I was talking 
to him and seemed incredibly, imperially bored. But I laid my case 
out for him and he finally said, ''Okay, fine. I’m going to help you.” 

He would have to go to Tehran, the guy told him, another im- 
possible spot on the map for an American journalist. The fixer 
gave him a letter of reference, an address, and a name. He wrote 
a letter in his hand. He sealed it and handed it to Chivers. 

He went to the Iranian Embassy in London and told them he 
was a bird-watcher and that he wanted to go look at the migrat- 
ing birds in Iran, and could he please have a visa? The clerk slid 
a form over to him to fill out. For profession, he wrote “writer.” 
And I gave them my passport, and I thought. There’s no fucking 
way they’re going to give me a visa. 

A week later, he returned to find a visa waiting for him. 

In Tehran, he checked into a hotel with the stack of bird-watch- 
ing books he’d picked up at the Natural History Museum, and 
the next morning made his way to the address his fixer had giv- 
en him, taking a cab to a tired-looking apartment complex on the 
edge of the city. Upstairs there was an office and a couple Kurdish 
guys in shabby suits, cigarette smoke hanging down to belt level. 
“Mr. sent me,” Chivers told them. “I have a letter.” 

In English one of the men said, “No shit?” 

He read the letter and intensely smoked a cigarette, and he 
doesn’t take his eyes off of me as he puts it on the table, and finally 
I say, "So what’s the fucking letter say?” 

The guy replied, as if reciting the letter, “These men are our 
brothers. Take them into Kurdistan, and kill them.” 

Then the man threw his head back and laughed. Wiseass. 

Following the guy’s instructions, Chivers drove across Iran to a 
town on the Iraqi border. A few days later, after getting discovered 
by the Revolutionary Guard and a nervous and angry brown-robed 
cleric who took him in for questioning and seemed undecided 
what to do with an American journalist posing as a bird-watch- 
er and wandering freely about, Chivers finally made it to a dirt 
road that went down into a gulley, and on the other side of the gul- 



Shazam the photo above to read Chivers's award-winning account 
of the terrorist attack in Beslan, Russia, "The School." 


ley was Iraq. There on the side of the road one morning at dawn 
waited a Mercedes. One of his fixer’s nephews got out of the car. 

“Hey, dude!” he said in a British accent. “Welcome to Iraq!” 

More specifically, he would be in Sulaimaniya, in Iraqi Kurdis- 
tan, where he would spend the next few months building the in- 
frastructure of a news organization from scratch— locating decent 
hospitals, getting plenty of cash, vehicles, reliable drivers, transla- 
tors, and fixers. At the time, there was basically no one else there. 

I ended up with good drivers, excellent translators who happened 
to be medical students, so they could put a tourniquet on us or them- 
selves if they had to, he says. Sturdy vehicles. Bags of cash. First- 
aid kit. Worked through the bazaars to get helmets and flak j’ackets. 

The armies amassed and the U. S. invasion began and seemed 
to end rather quickly. The Times offered him the Baghdad bu- 
reau. His editors told him that Baghdad was going to be a great 
story of reconstruction, that he’d have a house, with a swimming 
pool, and that he could even move his family there. Chivers was 
startled. You realize that the war is still going on, right? You un- 
derstand that it’s really just getting going, right? I’m not gonna go 
to Baghdad for the swimming pool. 

He turned down the job. He suspected that a lot more destruc- 
tion and death would happen before an 5 Thing that could be called 
“reconstruction” would begin, and believed from what he’d seen 
that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would likely engage the 
United States for years to come. The fundamental story of the 
wars— at least the story that he felt best equipped to report— 
would be the experience of the American soldier as only a for- 
mer Marine could tell it, and he thought that a significant part 
of that story would be embedded in shell casings and bomb frag- 
ments and the complex new ordnance of extraordinary power 
that soldiers would be subject to. He believed that the globaliza- 
tion of the arms trade would have unintended consequences for 
American forces. Many of the endless arms America had export- 
ed over the years would wind up being used against it— a story no 
journalist had yet seen fit to pursue. 

What Chivers didn’t know was that in the coming years that 
story and the larger story of the twenty-first century’s wars would 
take him from Iraq and Afghanistan to the “Arab Spring” in Lib- 
ya and Syria to Vladimir Putin’s territorial ambitions in Ukraine; 
from his landmark chronicle of the Chechen school siege at Beslan 
for Esquire to his harrowing report in the Times on the previ- 
ously secret American casualties of abandoned chemical -weap- 
ons stocks in Iraq to The Gun, his definitive history of the AK-47. 

I understood the war wasn’t going away, he says. None of these 


202 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 

















II WB 






stories that I had worked on were going to stop. They still haven’t 
stopped. I understood that this was going to be a marathon. More 
than a marathon. I didn’t know it’d be a lifetime. 

IT'S HARD TO IDENTIFY EXACTLY WHEN THE 

turning point came. 

Was it the moment when he became so hypervigilant, so tactical- 
ly alert, that he analyzed every common moment of every common 
day— from taking his kids to school to having a cup of coffee with 
a friend— in terms of survivability? I wouldn’t sit there if I were you, 
Chivers told his friend at a cafe in midtown Manhattan on a sunny 
day a couple years ago. When the blast comes, you’ll be covered in glass. 

Was it the day during the worst of the Libyan conflict, when 
the government shelled the hill Chivers was on as he tried to find 
a safe place to stand? He was on the phone with a Times editor 
named Rogene Jacquette, who could hear the artillery barrage, 
when he had to hit the dirt and suddenly lost the call. A few min- 
utes later, he managed to get Jacquette back on the line, but she 
was too distraught to talk. She had thought he was dead. 

Or was it on that day in April 2011 when he was blown into the 
air by a NATO bomb? Or a few weeks before when Hetherington 
and Hondros were killed by mortar fire? After that day, Chivers, 
along with Sidney Kwiram of Human Rights Watch, made hasty 
arrangements to get the dead out of there. This required finding 
a refrigerated truck and persuading a vessel in Misurata, a port 
under bombardment, to stay long enough to take them to Beng- 
hazi, where the bodies could be airlifted home. 

‘T have to write about this,” he told Denton, who was with him 
in Benghazi. “We were in Chris’s room, and I remember look- 
ing over as he was writing,” says Denton, who recounts the mo- 
ment as if it were something he would never forget. “And then he 
stopped and just started quietly sobbing in his hands.” 

Denton and Kwiram put a hand on each shoulder. “I just need 
a minute,” Chivers said. 

Many journalists say that the deaths of Hetherington and Hon- 
dros changed the way that business is done in war zones and drove 
some writers and photographers from war coverage altogether. 
No doubt that thought occurred to Chivers, too. But no, Misura- 
ta wasn’t the moment, either. 

I always thought I’d be done wheni got shot, or when something 
worse happened to me, he says today. 

Before leaving for his last trip to Iraq last year, he and Suzanne 
and two of their sons were sitting around the dinner table playing 
pitch when one of his boys started to itch terribly. He was sudden- 
ly covered in hives from head to toe. They called the family doc- 
tor, who was puzzled because he could find no clear medical rea- 
son for the hives. There was no indication of an infection, and the 
hives didn’t resemble the kind caused by allergy. A couple days lat- 
er, Chivers left on his trip to Iraq. It was to be a short assignment- 
three weeks or so. While there, he spoke regularly with Suzanne, 
who said their son’s rash had not gone away. Then, on the day he 
arrived home, the hives disappeared, suddenly and completely. 

Chivers consulted the doctor, who told him that the rash was 
almost certainly an autoimmune miscue and was probably caused 
by terror. His son had been afraid for his father’s life. 

A switch went off at that moment for me. You know ...I mean, I 
realized I couldn’t do that to him. And for a few weeks, I quietly ar- 
gued with myself about this and tried to find a way to mentally, to 
see if I could get the switch back into its old position. I remember ly- 



®© 


Shazam the photo above to read "The Long Walk." 

ingin bed night after night saying, I think that’s it. I think I’m done. 

Chivers talked to his brother, also a former Marine, and he 
said, “If your kid’s sick and you know the medicine that will heal 
him, do you withhold it?” 

Late last summer, in 2014, after returning from a trip to cover the 
fighting in eastern Ukraine, Chivers wrote to his editor at the Times 
and asked to be reassigned. “I have basically been studying orga- 
nized violence and combatants since I was nineteen and decided to 
join the Marine Corps,” he wrote. “I welcome the chance to open 
myself to new themes.” He has not been back to a war zone since. 

Over the past year, he has dedicated himself to what he calls 
a program of return, of integrating back into normal life. Which 
means, among other things, that he is trying to be less vigilant. 

I think if you talk to any well-trained small-unit infantry guy, 
whether an experienced NCO or up through captain, they’ll tell you 
that when they move through civilian life— when they’re driving 
through, say, a town— they endlessly are thinking about how they 
would do various tactical things in that environment. 

Does that constitute PTSD?I have never sought diagnoses, and 
I don’t study that. Do I feel different? I’d say, sure, I am dijferent. I 
should be different. Is it all bad? It’s bad when it takes up too much 
of your bandwidth, because you’re thinking about that you’re not 
thinking about something else, and that can be stunting, to put it 
gently. But it’s also maybe why a lot of people are still alive, right? 
You go into the forest long enough, you become a forest creature. 

He has devised strategies to exhaust himself, he says, so that 
he can get true rest, without the persistent thoughts and alert- 
ness and memories of living in war. He has decided that he has 
to remain in motion: He takes his boat out with his kids every 
day the seas aren’t too choppy. Last year alone, they hauled in a 
thousand pounds of fish. He splits wood. And he gardens, or it 
would be more accurate to say— given the amount of potatoes and 
onions and beans and broccoli and squash involved— he/arms. 

And he has a new role at the Times. As word got around the pa- 
per last fall that Chivers was leaving the foreign desk, he was in 
the newsroom in New York, putting the finishing touches on his 
major chemical-weapons story (part of his new role with the in- 
vestigations desk). When the editor he’d been on the phone with 
from Libya, Rogene Jacquette, spotted him, she walked over to 
say she had heard the news. Chivers told her about his boy, about 
the game of cards and the hives and his terrible dread. He said it 
was as if a message were being sent through his son that it was 
time to go, in a way that even I could understand. 

Jacquette took that in for just a moment and said, ‘We should all be 
thankful for your son.” And then she said, “Because he is ablessing.” lit 


204 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 



■(nnnrf!i¥ij 








WRITER, JOURNALIST, 

ESQUIRE LEGEND I 81 

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS 

INTERVIEWED BY CAL FUSSMAN 

> The interesting thing about “Martin 
Luther King Is Still on the Case!” is I didn’t 
even ask [editor] Harold Hayes if he wanted 
me to write it. 

I was soaking in the bathtub, reading, 
when my wife came in. She said, “They’ve 
killed Dr. King.” And I said, “Get me a plane 
ticket while I get ready.” I got out of the 
bath, dried off, and Natalie got me the last 
ticket on the plane to Memphis. 

I hung around for a couple days at the 
church and the garbage strikers’ union 
hall, talking to leaders of the strike. There 
were only a few buses headed to Dr. King’s 
funeral. Space was tight. They were go- 
ing to use folding chairs in the middle of 
the aisles to fit in as many people as they 
could. I realized I’d be displacing some- 
body if they let me on, but they took a vote 
and decided to give me a seat. 

> Every professor says that what sur- 
prises them is how little the new students 
remember about anything more than two 
or three years ago. It was very revealing the 


DUBIOUS 


ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS 


1976 


OKAY, ANNE FRANK, 

YOU CAN COME OUT NOW! 

Composer Richard Wagner’s seventy- 
eight-year-old daughter-in-law, 
Winifred Wagner, a close friend of 
Adolf Hitler for twenty-two years, 
told the world that Der Fuhrer had 
been misunderstood. He had a “good 
and human” nature, she said, 
“immensely appealing” eyes, and was 
“really touching with the children.” 



first time I realized that a student had no 
memory of the civil-rights movement or 
Vietnam. They live intensely in the now, 
and there’s practically no “then” that they 
have a workable knowledge of. 

> You have to build writing on reading. 
When students come to me and ask “How 
do I become a writer?” I say, “Who’s your 
favorite author?” If they say “I don’t have 
one,” I say to them, “You’ll never be a writer 
until you have one.” 

> If no other writer has an impact on you, 
how can you expect to have an impact on 
anybody? 

> My model of respect is Murray Kemp- 
ton. He talked with everybody and saw 
through everybody but always treated peo- 
ple with respect. He would interview a Ku 
Klux Klanner and be famously respectful. 
He covered labor and he really got to de- 
spise the corruption, but he told me, “You 
always realize that these are people. Jimmy 
Hoffa is just a thug. But I can’t dislike him, 
because he’s the only labor boss I know 
who is faithful to his wife.” 


> One of the causes of the deterioration 
in writing is that it’s not done for the ear. 
I’ve had very articulate students hand in 
muddled and inconsequent papers. Then 
I ask them to read their papers aloud and 
they realize that the sentences don’t real- 
ly connect or that parts are not in any intel- 
ligible order, because they have not in any 
way thought of writing as a sound. 

> When I was a kid, I would meet dogs when 
I was out walking around, pet them, talk 
to them, and they would follow me home. 

> Sometimes when you say “I’ve read a 
book,” you probably haven’t unless you’ve 
reread it. 

> Preserve serenity. That’s what people 
really treasure— when somebody shows a 
real peace with themselves and with oth- 
ers. To keep that serenity through all of 
life’s hard blows sets a person apart. 

> Clearly, the need for something other 
than material satisfaction can be triggered 
if you have the right concentration. 

> What does it all mean? Saint Augustine 
says, “If you understand it, it’s not God.” 


©0 


Shazam the above illustration to go to Wills's classic 1968 story "Martin Luther King Is Still on the Case!" 


206 ESQUIRE -OCTOBER 2015 


ILLUSTRATION BY RALPH STEADMAN 



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Shazam this illustration to read Tom Wolfe's 
unforgettable Nascar feature, "The Last 
American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!" 


WOLFE, TOM 

ONE OF THE GREAT PLEASURES ofreading Tom Wolfe- of 
still reading Tom Wolfe— is the sense of awe he consistently inspires. 

No, not through his grasp of character, as Talese; or the lengths to 
which he allowed his sentences to go in pursuit of his thoughts, as 
Mailer; or the extent of his humanity, as Sack. What inspires awe 
in Wolfe is simply that he fucking got away with it. 

I’m not referring to any one thing; I’m referring to everything— 
to every sentence, every paragraph, every story, every jot and tit- 
tle. His reputation has suffered because he was never a particu- 
larly literary writer; Updike, over at The New Yorker, turned up 
his nose at Wolfe’s novels and rendered what was meant as a de- 
cisive judgment: “entertainment, not literature, even literature 
in a modest aspirant form.” But if literature is, as Ezra Pound 
said, “news that stays news,” Wolfe, as a journalist in the sixties 
and the seventies, wrote something even harder to achieve: news 
that somehow managed to stay new. Sure, he was radical then— so 
was everybody. The miracle of Tom Wolfe is that he remains rad- 
ical now and that the experience of reading, say, “Radical Chic” 
again is not unlike the experience of listening to “Brown Sugar” 


on the radio for the umpteenth time: You 
still can’t believe he’s saying what he’s say- 
ing, and you envy him his freedom not only 
to say it but also to dance to it. 

He is such an original that he remains 
the only journalist to have his own ori- 
gin story, his own creation myth. Finding 
himself blocked in his efforts to write a 
proper magazine article about a custom- 
car convention Esquire had assigned him 
to cover in California back in 1963, he in- 
stead wrote an improper one, typing up 
his notes in one overnight binge and send- 
ing them to editor Byron Dobell in the 
form of a letter. Dobell struck the “Dear 
Byron” and published the rest, and in so 
doing became the Sam Phillips to Wolfe’s 
Elvis. Faced with the challenge of the new, 
Wolfe became the new, a writer who was 
unwilling to sacrifice urgency to propri- 
ety, who entertained without succumb- 
ing to a professional obligation to seem 
merely amused, and who was never afraid 
of looking and sounding ridiculous in or- 
der to render the ridiculousness of a cul- 
ture remaking itself through an unlikely 
war between money and status. 

What did he get away with? Well, unlike 
the esteemed Joseph Mitchell, he didn’t 
get away with making it up, nor did he get 
away with getting it wrong. If anything, he 
is accused of getting it right, mercilessly. I 
remember listening to a discussion on the 
radio with the daughter of Leonard Bern- 
stein, who complained that her father and 
mother were simply never the same after 
Wolfe got through with them in “Radical Chic.” It wasn’t just that 
he was mean to them; it was that he didn’t take them seriously: 
He did the unforgivable and found them funny. 

It’s worth looking at what j ournalists are doing now for a keener 
appreciation of what Wolfe was up to then. There is certainly 
no want of journalistic ambition among the purveyors of what 
is now called “long-form,” nor of novelistic technique brought 
to bear on nonfiction, nor of outrage. What has gone missing— 
or been left to the provocateurs of the right— is outrageousness 
and a sense of something like larceny and a willingness to up- 
end the moral assumptions of reporting. A. J. Liebling boasted 
that he wrote faster than anyone who wrote better and bet- 
ter than anyone who wrote faster. But Wolfe wrote funnier, 
and the enduring shock of his work is that it remains so today. 
We are trained to distinguish between journalism that’s short 
and long, that’s responsible and irresponsible, that stands for 
the right values and stands for the wrong. But in the end, it’s all 
sheep’s clothing, because there is so very little Wolfe. 

-TOM JUNOD 


208 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


ILLUSTRATION BY RALPH STEADMAN 






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OVER ONE THOUSAND ISSUES, WE GOT THEM WRONG MORE OFTEN THAN WE GOT THEM 
RIGHT. JUST ASK NORMAN MAILER AND NORA EPHRON. BY LISA TADDEO 


NOT IN HEAVEN BUT someplace close 
by, Norman Mailer sits with Nora Ephron 
at a lily-white table piled high with airy 
grilled- cheese sandwiches. They are both 
as beautiful as they wanted to be. 

Nora says to Norman, Our names were 
alike, but that’s the end of it. 

That’s not true at all, Norman replies. 
You and me, we had a slew in common. 
War. Wegotism. Women. Wangs. 

I’m not obsessed with war, says Nora, 
never was. 

Fine, says Norman, Waistlines and Wom- 
en, then. He lights her cigarette and pulls 
down a heavy book from a floating Ikea 
shelf We were so obsessed with women be- 
cause we couldn’t get them straight, he says. 

Speak for yourself Women have these 
stitches— they’re made up of billions of 
them. Thousands, anyway. What men 
like you do when they get women half 
right is they pluck one of these stitches, 
pulled by the atmosphere or by some 
douchebag who’s slept with her lately. Then 
they glorify that stitch, or vilify it, or con- 
duct some faux-reverent treatment of the 
stitch that is alternately laudatory and cruel. 
Madonna and whore, Pauline Kael and 
Kim Kardashian. Is that Esquire or Sophie’s 
Choice^ I know you shuffle between the two. 

What? says Norman. It’s Esquire. I don’t 
know what Sophie’s Choice is. 

Hand it over. I’ll show you. Nora grabs 
the book. Tom Robbins on Debra Winger’s 
voice, from 1993: “[It] sounds as if it’s been 
strained through Bacall and Bogey’s honey- 


moon sheets and then hosed down with 
plum brandy.” One thousand issues of that 
gluttonous dookie. 

You’re pissed because they got it right, 
says Norman. 

Sometimes, says Nora, taking a deep and 
thoughtful drag. 

For example, says Norman, George A. 
McNamara’s 1937 ode to jiggling: “the 
champagne of movement” that happens 
“when a young woman walks. Or turns or 
bends or reaches or stamps her foot. And 
she approaches the absolutely ultimate in 
jiggling when she runs.” 

What’s your point, guy? 

It’s gorgeous, it’s scientiflc. Only women 
without a jiggle would be pissed. 

You’re a weasel, how’s that for a W? Look 
at this asshole, Leland Stowe, in “What’s 
Wrong with Our Women?” from 1948: 
“There is no other country in the world 
where women wait so presumptuously for 
some male to light their cigarette. And this 
is the only country where obliging males 
frequently get not so much as a slight nod 
for their pains.” Or D, for Dickless. 

What about Capote, Breakfast at Tijfany’s, 
in ’58? says Norman. 

The only piece of writing you ever com- 
plimented that wasn’t your own. I suppose 
that’s notable. But yes, it’s true, he gets it 
right. Holly Golightly was every southern 
girl I ever knew in the big city. Moreover, 
she owned real estate in her own brain. But 
Capote was gay. I wrote in my column for 
Esquire about beauty. . . . 


Yes! says Norman. I happened to read 
that, at, uh, the doctor’s office. You said 
you couldn’t sympathize with a woman 
who was losing her beautiful looks because 
you yourself never had any. 

Well, yes, that’s true. 

So they got it right? 

Well, I got it right for them. 

Then look here, says Norman. Septem- 
ber 1962. Esquire sent a blazing-hot Gloria 
Steinem to write about sex on campus at 
the dawn of the Pill. Jesus, remember that? 
According to the piece, the biggest bitch for 
young coeds was that there weren’t “enough 
sexually liberated men to go around.” 

Oh sure, good for Esquire, until a decade 
later when they published Leonard Lev- 
itt’s “She.” That bastard said Gloria was 
willing to take on any persona, so long as 
the hot man of the moment was in tow. I 
heard she’s still furious about it. 

I heard she’s still hot. 

It’s a shame you didn’t stick around for 
Viagra. 

But I did! 

Gotcha. “She” was 1971? You had yourself 


DUBIOUS 

ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS 

1989 

▼ 

OLDEST 

NEWBORN 

Rose Schlossberg. 


^A.qiU7t£.(isSN 0194-9535) is published monthly (except combined issues in January/February and June/July), 10 times ayear, by Hearst Communications, Inc., 300 West 57th St., NY, NY 10019 USA. 
Steven R. Swartz, President and Chief Executive Officer; William R. Hearst III, Chairman; Frank A. Bennack, Jr., Executive Vice-Chairman; Catherine A. Bostron, Secretary. Hearst Magazines Division: David 
Carey, President; John A. Rohan, Jr., Senior Vice-President, Finance. © 2015 by Hearst Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. Esquire, Man at His Best, Dubious Achievement Awards, The Sound and 
the Fury, and @ are registered trademarks of Hearst Communications, Inc. Periodicals postage paid at N. Y, N. Y, and additional entry post offices. Canada Post International Publications mail product (Canadian 
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Subscription prices: United States and possessions, $7.97 ayear; Canada and all other countries, $19.97 ayear. Subscription services: Esquire will, upon receipt of a complete subscription order, undertake 
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will be returned unless accompanied by return postage and envelope. Canada BN NBR 10231 0943 RT. Postmaster: Please send address changes to Esquire, P. O. Box 6000, Harlan, lA 51593. Printed in the USA. 


210 ESQUIRE - OCTOBER 2015 


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a year. You were sent to debate Germaine 
Greer, and then she wrote about it for Es- 
quire. She was going to put down your 
looks before she saw how puny you actu- 
ally looked in person and felt bad for you. 

Norman winces, stuffs an entire grilled 
cheese through his lips. 

Now look here, says Nora, the eighties 
and nineties brought more stitches, like 
the feature on NBA groupies and an ag- 
ing literary novelist on the ever-popular 
old-guy yen for fucking younger women, 
the two running in back-to-back spring 
1992 issues. 

You’re speaking of Salter? 

Oh God, of course, your brother in 
arms. And now we get the annual Sex- 
iest Woman Alive next to an argument 
that it’s okay (finally!) to take your local 
forty-two -year- old to bed, not to mention 
the April 2015 Women and Men issue- 
one of Esquire’s handful of attempts in 


DUBIOUS 

ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS 

2001 

▼ 

THE HAIRPIECE SHOULD 
CUSHION IT 

“I may be bumping up 
against the glass ceiling of my 
own mediocrity.” 
—William Shatner on his 
Priceline.com commercials 


eighty- two years to dedicate an entire is- 
sue to how men relate to women in hopes 
of finally understanding them. But they 
can’t, because . . . 

Because WHY? 

Because Esquire is a mirror for all men, 
for the way your species has bungled our 
secret garden and then reseeded it and 
said, “Hey, Mom, look! I replanted the 
goddamn peonies I pissed on!” 

So what’s the takeaway, Nora? All men 
are peony pissers? Quite a stitch you’ve 
picked. 

No. The takeaway is, well, the takeaway 
is that women are necessary. Necessary in 
the most heavenly possible light . . . 

You mean like a case of crabs in Phuket? 

Look, it’s impossible to get anything 
ample down about women in a thousand 
issues that covers the life span of one 
woman, let alone the billions of stitches. 
But it’s a start. I hope you read Capote 
and you understand the deep needs of 
young girls from dusty places. I hope you 
become a mother and understand your 
mother. Become a wife and understand 
the housewife. Or at least read about 
them. I hope you read an entire history 
of women and you understand them 10 
percent better. 

That’s the problem with all you women. 
You all talk and write like women. 

At least we don’t write AnczentEvenzngs. 

Hey, Nora, don’t hate me because I’m 
beautiful. 


Y 



... is this man laughing? 

(It remains under investigation.) 




X+Y+Z=Gag;’ 


September 1935 


"THE SCIENTIFIC produc- 
tion of laughter as it is 
practiced by all celebrat- 
ed joke-makers" was the 
subhead to the first of 
Esquire's many analyses 
of what's funny: 

Another standard for- 
mula product is the hu- 
morous simile . . . . Arthur 
"Bugs" Baer shines in the 
field of simile and word- 
play. . . . [HJe methodically 
hammers out his snappy 
phrases, "a town so tough 
the canaries sing bass," 

"a Greenwich Village cafe 


where the girls are bois- 
terous and the boys are 
girlsterous." 


From "41 Howlers, 
Screamers, and 
Groaners to Get You 
Through the Holidays," 
December 1989: 

9. Duck walks into a drug- 
store, asks for some Chap 
Stick. Guy behind the 
counter says, "That'll be 
fifty-nine cents." Duck 
says, "Put it on my bill." 

10. Duck walks into a 
drugstore, asks for a 


package of condoms. 
Man behind the counter 
says, "Those cost three 
dollars; I imagine you'd 
like me to put them on 
your bill?" 

Duck says, "Sorry, I'm 
not that kind of duck." 


From "The Greatest 
Jokes Ever Told," June/ 
July 2015 (from Joe 
Mande): Two cannibals 
are eating a clown, and 
one looks at the other and 
says. Does this taste funny 
to you? 



Z\m, Joy of 

From “Zimmer” hy Scott Raab, July 2001: 
Zim hooks nothingbut a wee porgy round 
and shimmering blue-gold in the sun. 
He admires it a minute before Dave un- 
hooks it and tosses it back. “Look at that,” 
says Zimmer. “Is that a beautiful thing? I 
don’t care how big they are— I just wanna 
catch the pretty ones.” 

Beams burst off him like a Buddha at the 
glimmer of satori. 

“I love this,” Zimmer says with a child’s 
glee. “I’ll tell you that— I love this. I do. I 
love this. I really do.” 

. . . Like love, Zimmer’s all around us. All 
you need are eyes to see. 


212 ESQUIRE • OCTOBER 2015 


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